Winslet is not a do-gooder, she just is. Now at 36, she is a twice-divorced mother of two. She has more worldly fireworks than other actresses her age, and doesn’t like to package herself as flawlessly as she appears in magazines.
It’s been statistically proven that the Oscars are a curse for most actresses, with career slumps and relationship problems after winning. Winslet is only halfway there. Last year, she and her husband, the famous director Sam Mendes, announced their divorce, but career-wise she is getting better and better. The Reader opened the door for her, and since then she has quickly found a direction in acting that she excels at: her precociousness allows her to take on a variety of roles as a housewife in the midst of a midlife crisis.
At the Venice Film Festival in early September, Winslet starred in “The Killing Joke,” “Contagion” and “Lust for Life,” all of which were presented. She can be a professional woman with superficial glamour, a humble, self-sacrificing middle-aged doctor, or a desperate housewife who has been abandoned by fate to make ends meet. The international media enthusiastically calls her the “Queen of Venice”. Wearing a black formal dress, light-colored shirt, high heels and a pearl necklace around her neck, Nancy looked smart and sharp. When she followed her lawyer husband into another couple’s home, she was dressed as a standard financial investment adviser.
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They came to make peace with another parent because their child was fighting at school. For just over 70 minutes, both couples blamed each other for their parenting styles, which also triggered their respective marital conflicts. At first, Nancy tried to be graceful and dignified, and occasionally pulled out her powder box to check her meter. Half an hour later, she couldn’t stand the middle-class hypocrisy any longer – she vomited in her host’s living room over the hardcover contemporary art books she’d just bought from London.
This vomit made her drop her mask and take on her “internal and external problems” like a fighter. The company’s first book, a hardcover contemporary art book, was published in the United States. She began to lose control of her emotions, slamming the flowers on the table, shouting and swearing …… She even began to drink, drunk and in disarray.
This is Winslet in “The Killing of a God”. The film, from director Roman Polanski, is playful, acerbic and absurd, like a sharp sword nakedly picking apart the hypocrisy and vulnerability of the contemporary middle class. It was also the highest-scoring film in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, with more than 20 international critics.
A reporter for the Guardian newspaper saw Winslet vomit and exclaimed, “It’s like a silence-breaker. The film’s audience responded wildly, with thunderous applause. “Maybe people are starting to let go. Kate is going to be herself.” The Guardian wrote.
As The Hollywood Reporter put it, “It’s only after Kate Winslet drops the character’s feigned elegance that the character’s true charm emerges.”
The film “God of Carnage” is based on a stage play by rising French author Yasmina Rezard, which won the 2009 Tony Award for best play. Polanski translated the French script into English, changing the setting from Paris to Brooklyn, New York. Co-starring with Winslet were Oscar-winning actors and actresses like Jodie Foster and Christopher Waltz. Polanski also took a page out of the stage play’s playbook, with essentially one living room scene in 78 minutes, and four actors battling each other’s acting skills in a cramped space, with on-screen time and real time exactly the same, in one take.
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The 76-year-old Polanski did not go to Venice for the press conference because of a lawsuit, and the other star, Judy Fordyce, was also absent for some reason. Winslet alone held up half of the film’s red carpet and launch party. The next day, she was sitting at the launch of “Lust for Life” again.
The five-part HBO miniseries “Lust for Life” is the first drama Winslet has taken on since she hesitated for 10 months. The original novel of the same name, by James M. Cain, was adapted into a film by the famous director Michael Curtis in 1945, starring Hollywood Golden Age actress Joan Crawford, who also won an Oscar for the title.
The 280-page script features Winslet’s character in almost every scene. In the midst of the Great Depression, the housewife was betrayed by her husband and gave up her dignity as a waitress to raise her two daughters. She eventually becomes a strong woman, but her spoiled daughter not only ruins her career but also steals her lover in a tragedy.
In fact, Winslet’s role in “Lust for Life” came at a time when Winslet herself was going through a divorce from Mendes, and Pierce’s character was more or less invested with her real personal emotions. Kate herself admits that Pierce is the closest she has been to herself in her many years in film. But even without this real-life emotional experience, Winslet is one of the best Hollywood actresses today to portray the strength, pain and disappointment of a female protagonist.
“It helped that when making this film, she presented a lot more traces of her real life that resembled her character than we expected.” Director Todd Haines said.