Kate Winslet in ‘Labor Day’/Image © Paramount
Although Kate Winslet calls her children “absolutely my everything,” the mothers she brings to life onscreen often struggle to put family first. I’ve had my eye on her since her film debut as a teen bludgeoning a friend’s mother in 1994’s “Heavenly Creatures,” and I’ve enjoyed watching how she’s shaped her career around complicated women, many of them with children. Her brave portrayals reveal women whose ambitions and insecurities land them in morally ambiguous territory, caught between what they want, what their children need, and what society expects.
“They’re in situations that they are trying to basically find their way out of — and find themselves at the same time,” she’s said. The thirty-eight-year-old has mastered this type of character, most recently earning a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in “Labor Day,” adapted from the novel by Joyce Maynard. In it, Winslet plays Adele, a depressed single mother who forms an unlikely family with Frank (Josh Brolin), an escaped convict.
Winslet appears later this year in “Divergent” as Jeanine Matthews, a sort of warped maternal figure whose aptitude test divides youths into factions in a dystopian future.
Learn more about Winslet, her own nontraditional family (having three children by three husbands) and her other maternal roles in my piece here.