Category Archives: Kate Winslet

Screen Actors Guild awards 2022: Squid Game, Will Smith and Coda win big

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Netflix phenomenon and Apple’s deaf family drama make history at this year’s SAG awards ceremony

The indie drama Coda has won big at this year’s Screen Actors Guild awards, picking up best ensemble in a movie and best supporting actor for Troy Kotsur, who is the first ever deaf actor to win an individual SAG award.

The Apple drama about a deaf family was bought for $25m from last year’s Sundance film festival and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture.

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Too hot for the plot: could a modelling job save Jamie Dornan’s character in Belfast?

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In Kenneth Branagh’s acclaimed drama, Dornan plays a penniless father whose astonishing good looks pass without comment. It’s not the first time the film industry has asked audiences to ignore an actor’s attractiveness

Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast clearly owes a debt to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Both films are named after places. They’re both autobiographical. They’re both filmed in black and white for maximum awards season impact. And yet the films differ in one key area. Cuarón, for the most part, filled his film with authentic-looking non-actors. Branagh, meanwhile, filled his with Jamie Dornan.

Which is no slight on Dornan. In recent years he’s proved himself to be one of our most charismatic and magnetic actors. Put a camera on Jamie Dornan and audiences won’t look away. Except in Belfast, he’s playing the down-at-heel dad of a family barely able to stay afloat. At one point he is almost sunk by a £500 tax bill. Which would be all too believable, save for the fact that Jamie Dornan looks like Jamie Dornan. If Belfast was set in any recognisable universe, then one of Dornan’s neighbours would have said, “Have you ever thought about becoming a model?”, or “I saw you singing Everlasting Love to professional standards in the club the other night, you could try doing that for a living”, or “You know what would get you out of this pickle? Playing a literal sex god in the movie adaptations of a wildly successful erotic novel series?” And he would have said yes and, because he is Jamie Dornan, all his debts would have been paid off by lunchtime.

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Golden Globes: The Power of the Dog and Succession win at celebrity-free ceremony

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Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association

The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.

Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.

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Those we lost in 2021: Roger Michell remembered by Kate Winslet

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5 June 1956 – 22 September 2021
The actor, who worked with the Notting Hill director on 2019’s Blackbird, recalls a warm and egoless man who always knew how to get the best out of his cast

Being a director was so secondary to who Roger was as a man in the world. He was just such a grounding, warm, extraordinary presence. I say this with affection, but some directors make it known that they’ve just walked into the room. Roger wasn’t like that. He didn’t need to be needed. He didn’t have an ego. He just wanted to be part of a team – creating little families, little families of people working together.

I had known Roger for a long time before we worked together on a film – Blackbird, in 2019. We’d worked together once before, in 2005, on an American Express commercial. A few years prior to that, The Mother [his 2003 film with Daniel Craig and Anne Reid] had completely taken my breath away. It was so natural, so crushingly real. It felt like the first time in a long time that any of us had seen actors in a film appearing not be “acting” at all. That was one of Roger’s most impressive skills: his capacity to get actors to just be. To just be and not act.

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Emmys 2021: Ted Lasso and The Crown triumph while no actors of color win

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The big night for TV saw triumphs for Brits – including Olivia Colman, Kate Winslet and Michaela Coel – yet a diversity problem remains

The 73rd Emmy awards mostly stuck to the predicted script on Sunday, celebrating favorites Ted Lasso, The Queen’s Gambit, and The Crown, in an awards-stuffed return to a (mostly) normal ceremony that celebrated diversity yet handed all the acting awards to white performers.

Related: Emmys 2021: the full list of winners

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Mare of Easttown finale review – Kate Winslet drama is a stunning, harrowing success

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The actor’s turn as a complex, fallible detective has been a privilege to witness, in a murder mystery that kept us guessing right to the profoundly moving end

In interviews, Kate Winslet always said it wasn’t a thriller. And she was right. Yes, Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic) began with a murder in a small, bleak Pennsylvania town and Winslet’s police detective Mare Sheehan being called upon to investigate. But it was almost immediately clear that the seven-part drama was setting up to be so much more – and even clearer soon after that it was likely to succeed in all its endeavours.

It was a character study, of how a woman ground down by life after the loss of a son to drugs and suicide, the consequent divorce from her husband and raising of her grandson in the face of a custody battle with his mother (her son’s former girlfriend, rehabbed but fragile) endures.

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Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown – style icon of the pandemic

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The Pennsylvania detective’s unvarnished realness has hit a fashion nerve with viewers

The style icon everyone is talking about wears drab flannel shirts with flat shoes and crumpled jeans. She has frown lines and dark roots. She might wear mascara if she’s going out to eat but if she’s going to work she doesn’t bother. As a Pennsylvania detective in Mare of Easttown, the Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet bucks the trend for high fashion on the small screen that has given us a string of glossy shows such as Succession, Queen’s Gambit and Halston, with a character whose unvarnished realness has hit a nerve.

A grizzled detective with a complicated personal life; a naked female corpse; a sleepy small town squirrelled with secrets. The set-up of HBO’s hit show, Mare of Easttown is familiar TV fare, but the transformation of serial Vogue cover star Kate Winslet into Mare Sheehan provides an unexpected plot twist. Nowhere to be seen are the blow-dries of Big Little Lies or the silk blouses and velvet coats of The Undoing. Instead, the first episode sees Detective Sheehan dressed in nondescript denim and sack-adjacent plaid, one woolly-socked foot up on her kitchen table, drinking a bottle of beer while using a bag of frozen oven chips as an improvised ice pack for a sprained ankle.

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Kate Winslet: ‘I’ve been asked so many times about the intimate scenes’

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Kate Winslet on facing down misogyny in film, strange lockdown habits and the unexpected joys of fossil hunting

A man is adjusting the angle of his laptop. “Hello!” he waves. Is that a dishwasher behind him? A little wooden knick-knack, painted with “Let’s Dance” in a jaunty font, balances on an Aga. I have landed in a cheery overlit garage, somewhere on the south coast. And then the nice man moves to the side and bloody hell there’s Kate Winslet. Movie-star Kate Winslet – “Hiya!” – in a smart black jacket with her hair tied back, and that famous smile where it looks like she’s trying not to laugh at a filthy joke.

The man is her husband, Ned [Abel Smith, previously Ned Rocknroll] and the garage is their “little barn”. “It’s not actually a particularly nice little barn,” she says, her energy very much that of a kindly lady doing your bra fitting at Marks & Spencer – I like her immediately. “But over here, can you see the amazing sink? That’s from the set of Mildred Pierce. It’s got shit taps. But I do like to try to take a little something from my films. I took all the curtains from the cottage in The Holiday…” Her children, Mia (20, her daughter with her first husband Jim Threapleton), Joe (16, from her second marriage, to Sam Mendes) and Bear (born in 2013 soon after she married Ned) keep cutting them up, smaller and smaller: “To, like, upcycle their jeans. Also, I did a film called All the King’s Men where Jude Law and I had to do this snogging scene at a table, where we snog, snog, snogged our socks off. And it was so fabulous. As the scene was happening I kept thinking: ‘I’m going to have to buy this table.’ So I did!”

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