Kate Winslet Is ‘Fragile And Frightened’ In ‘Labor Day’


The role Kate Winslet plays in her new movie, Labor Day is not the Kate we are used to.

The film is both a romance and drama, in which Kate plays Adele Wheeler, a fragile, single mother too frightened of the outside world to get in her car and drive to the shops.

The setting is a small New Hampshire town in 1987. Adele’s 13-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) has assumed many of the domestic responsibilities for those things his mother can’t, or won’t do.

An escaped convict (Josh Brolin) enters the story, and director Jason Reitman’s film traces the events that follow, and what subsequently happens to Winslet’s character, Adele.

Kate said:

“I hadn’t played a character who was so the opposite of the sort of strong, strident, more obviously passionate women that I think I’ve played in the past.

I was keen to explore somebody who was much more introverted and fragmented,” she says. “… I was fascinated by that. I had played mothers, but I hadn’t really played a single mother to a son of that age. And that’s a particularly interesting dynamic….

Also, I was drawn to the unexpected nature of the love story, which I found very moving.”

Labor Day, premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival and Winslet received a best actress Golden Globe nomination.

During the course of Winslet’s career, she has been nominated for six Oscars, winning the best actress trophy for her role in The Reader as a Nazi concentration camp guard trying to conceal her past.

Kate Winslet, 38, and her husband, Ned Rocknroll – Richard Branson’s nephew – became parents of a baby boy last December. She already has an older daughter and son, from her two previous marriages to Jim Threapleton and director Sam Mendes.

Winslet’s next project is The Dressmaker, to be directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse later this year.

When asked to look back at her career, Kate considered three projects especially important to her development as an actress.

The first was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the 2004 love story, in which Winslet plays a free spirit named Clementine, with the orange hair to match.

Secondly, Winslet chose Little Children, directed by Todd Field’s in 2009. She played a mother and housewife who falls into an affair with a stay-at-home dad.

Finally, she selected her Emmy-winning performance in the Todd Haynes-directed made-for-TV film, Mildred Pierce.

For Kate Winslet, all these roles were about growing more confident, “Acting is so much about just actually having the confidence to step out there and do your best. And forget everything else… all the fear, all the pressures that you put on yourself, and actually learning how to get rid of that stuff. And that can take quite a long time.”

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