“”””PLACE YOUR ORDER WITHOUT ANY HESITATIONS””””

KATE WINSLET ON FEARLESSNESS, MOTHERHOOD,

MARRIAGE, AND THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

London, one Friday in late June, the scene is a dark, windowless editing suite. Kate Winslet is recording dialogue for Lee, a film she produced and stars in, about the life and work of Lee Miller, the Vogue model turned photographer turned war correspondent who documented the horrors of the concentration camps in the Second World War and was famously photographed in Hitler’s bathtub.

This kind of carefully synced audio work requires precision and practiced technique. “It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube within a time limit,” explains Winslet, who is fond of a metaphor. “It’s like finding that piece of cloud with the birds for the last corner of the jigsaw puzzle. That kind of satisfaction.”

Winslet is dressed down in a pair of tight jeans and a T-shirt over which tumble several fine gold chain necklaces; her hair is tied back in a workaday ponytail. When I arrive it is mid­morning and she has been at it since 8 a.m. and will continue, without a lunch break, until past three in the afternoon. She crouches over the micro­phone, waggles her hands, focusing on the minute adjustments of tone, inflection, volume, stress, and pitch, fine-​​tuning individual words to make sure she nails Miller’s midcentury American accent. “I didn’t have enough r on the never. Let’s do it again, please,” she asks the sound technician. “Just one more, a little bit more downplayed…. Can you bring up the level of the fuck?”

“Kate is the fastest audio in the West,” says Kate Solomon, her coproducer on Lee.

“After 30 years of doing this, I should be,” says Winslet laughing, deflecting the compliment.

Kate Winslet is an actor at the top of her game. She has honed her craft through 37 feature films and several highly regarded miniseries, working with many of the great directors of the day—Jane Campion, Todd Field, Ang Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle—and starring opposite the best actors of her generation: Leonardo DiCaprio, Harvey Keitel, Susan Sarandon, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, Jodie Foster, Saoirse Ronan. She has been nominated for seven Oscars, winning in 2009 for The Reader, in which she played a former concentration camp guard who embarks on a postwar affair with a teenage boy, and has won five BAFTAs, five Golden Globes, four SAG awards, and two Emmys.

It’s a long way from where Winslet started out—“The fat kid at the back with the wrong fucking shoes on,” as she told me. She likes to say she owes her career to the luck of being cast at age 17 by Peter Jackson in Heavenly Creatures, an intimate and darkly brilliant film based on the true story of two girls who killed a woman in 1950s New Zealand, and then again in the megahit Titanic when she was 20. But in fact Winslet has always worked hard to make her own luck.

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