NAKED AMBITION
Kate Winslet reveals she’s ‘proud’ of lesbian sex scenes with co-star Saoirse Ronan in Ammonite
SHE is no stranger to stripping off on camera but Kate Winslet went even further with the same-sex scenes in her latest film – by choreographing them herself.
Romantic drama Ammonite, out later this year, sees Kate, 44, get steamy with 26-year-old Little Women actress Saoirse Ronan.
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The film, directed by God’s Own Country’s Francis Lee, is set on the Dorset coast in the 1840s and inspired by the life of reclusive fossil hunter Mary Anning, played by Kate, who finds love with the younger Charlotte Murchison, played by Saoirse.
Kate — who romped with Leonardo DiCaprio in 1997 blockbuster Titanic — says of her latest X-rated action: “Saoirse and I choreographed it. Francis was nervous and I just said, ‘Let us work it out’.
“We did, ‘We’ll start here. We’ll do this with the kissing, boobs. You go down there, do this, then climb up here’.
“I felt the proudest I’ve ever felt doing a love scene — and by far the least self-conscious.”
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Kate spent months researching her character and how Mary became world famous for her finds in cliffs at Lyme Regis.
She spent a month working with a palaeontologist, studied a recording of the local dialect and learned to draw.
She says: “Funnily enough, I had to do quite a lot of art training. I’m not a natural artist but Mary drew her finds and in the film draws Charlotte — so I worked with an artist and loved it.
“But really it was embracing the groundedness and stillness of Mary that I found challenging.”
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Kate also lived away from the cast for most of the week, in a cottage on a pebbled beach near the cliffs. She says: “I’d go home, make soup, sit, write, work on scenes for the next day, go to bed, get up and do the same.
“I tried to adopt the anchoring routine Mary had. It helped me stay rooted in her story.”
Kate’s husband Ned Smith would visit from the family home in West Wittering, West Sussex, with their six-year-old son Bear.
Kate’s daughter Mia, 19, by first husband Jim Threapleton, and son Joe, 16, by her second husband, director Sam Mendes, also visited.
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Kate says: “I spent about three nights a week down there by myself then Ned would come with our little one and one of the older ones normally.
“I’m fortunate to be in a position where my husband is in the home doing the things I would ordinarily be doing. It’s a choice we made as a unit.
“Ned is at home for the majority of time, which, with a bit of juggling, enables us to all stick together.
“We are lucky we can make it work.” It is no surprise Kate drove herself to filming, too. She says: “I don’t have assistants on set, never have.” She also did her own stunts as her character scales cliffs looking for fossils — and she refused, unlike many movie stars, to diet before the cameras started rolling.
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In one interview, Kate revealed: “I’m nearly 45 and Saoirse is almost half my age. To have an opportunity to be my real, fortysomething self, post-children, you know . . . women aren’t really having the courage to do that.
‘WOMEN, THEN, WERE MEANT TO MARRY TO HAVE A LIFE’
“I was just excited to say, ‘This is what it is, peeps. This is how I am now and it’s very much not the body I had 20 years ago’.”
Kate has been making films for more than 20 years and had her first screen kiss with a woman in 1994 crime thriller Heavenly Creatures — then became a household name after her role in Titanic.
She won a Best Actress Oscar for 2008 romantic drama The Reader.
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Before her Academy Awards triumph, she had also been nominated for Best Actress for Titanic, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and 2006’s Little Children, and for Best Supporting Actress for 1995’s Sense And Sensibility and 2001’s Iris — in which she played the late novelist Iris Murdoch.
She was again up for Best Supporting Actress for 2016 biopic Steve Jobs, about the US computer pioneer.
But Ammonite is one of her proudest moments.
She says: “The thing I feel most when I watch the film, and I feel proudest of, is that this is a same-sex, intimate relationship in a period setting, yet they are not hiding, not having to run around and avoid society.
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“They are simply in love and discover who they truly are through this connection that they form.”
She adds: “Women of that time really had no purpose at all — they were meant to get married to a man in order to have a life and livelihood. Mary had nothing yet didn’t marry a man to lift herself out of poverty — she continued to do the thing she loved and believed in.”
Kate and Ned, 42 — the nephew of business mogul Richard Branson — normally travel together to wherever her filming is scheduled.
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But Kate’s work plans were thrown up in the air by the pandemic so they spent the summer in the UK — and Ned and the children learned the piano.
Kate says: “I don’t play piano but everyone else in my family has been teaching themselves.
“So we’ve got a six-and-a-half-year-old, a 42-year-old, 16-year-old and 19-year-old all teaching themselves piano. Get me out of the house!”
But she adds of lockdown: “We do feel very fortunate to have been able to have this moment. I’ve gotten very good at pre-cooking meals, knowing there’s a conference call to do, a Zoom meeting or something. Making dinner at 10am has become very much my forte.”
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She is “dreading” going back to work with Covid-secure restrictions but is excited to see her friends.
Throughout lockdown, she and her close actress friend Emma Thompson, 61, stayed in touch regularly.
Kate says they shared “hilarious text messages with her going, ‘Winslet, where the f*** are you? We haven’t seen you for ages. You must be about 100 by now’.”
They were also “sending each other photographs of our lunches and things like photos showing how full our glass of wine is on a Friday night”.
Life in Kate’s house sounds fun. Her Oscar for The Reader is at home and she has let her children play with it.
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There is a big chance she will be nominated again for Ammonite, but she remains very down to earth.
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Kate says of the trophy: “I have it at home. It’s awesome, the kids have fun with it.
“It’s the stuff of dreams, that little dream came true for me right there — and you just move on, you just go back to the hard work. It’s just a f***ing Oscar at the end of the day.”
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