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Kate Winslet: Kids keep me grounded

Labor Day star admits acting is 'weird'.

Kate says she has been able to 'stay balanced' in her life (Credit: Rex)

Kate Winslet has been at the top of her game since she made her big screen debut in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures  aged just 18. Now starring in Jason Reitman’s ‘Labor Day’, the Oscar-winner tells Yahoo that her longevity is down to hard work, a healthy balance, and acknowledging that the film business is just “weird”.
 
“I had to stay in London the night of the premiere,” she remembers. “So as we were driving the children to school I said, ‘Mummy’s staying in London tonight and then tomorrow morning your friends might see something in the newspaper.’ My daughter turned around and went: ‘That is really weird. Isn’t it random?’ It is! I do feel that, rather more than staying on top, I’ve been able to stay balanced.”
 
But Winslet admitted it isn’t easy for everyone to acknowledge the crazy. “Look at this whole Miley Cyrus… whatever it is that she’s up to,” she says. “You just think, ‘Who’s helping these people?’ So I’ve been really blessed, because I’ve been dealt equal measures of great roles and success, and really lovely life cards too.”

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Still, she thinks perseverance has played its part. “I feel like the work has dipped in and out,” she admits. “There’ve been quieter times and busier times. And when I work I do really work hard, and I really love it. I’m quite private about it too, which I’m realising as I get older. I just go underground a little bit. I’m still me: this is exactly how I am on set. I’m the same person. But I do really concentrate and I am prepared and professional and all of those things that every actor should be.”
 


She admits to preparing heavily for the part of Adele in ‘Labor Day’, an agoraphobic woman who lives in seclusion with her young son and is forced to take in an escaped prisoner, despite director Jason Reitman’s insistence that she not. “Jason doesn’t like rehearsal and he doesn’t like his actors to prepare too much,” she says. “I don’t mind about not rehearsing at all, but in terms of preparation I just had to ignore him. I just don’t trust myself enough not to do the work.”
 
The work involved reading Joyce Maynard’s book, on which the film is based, “over and over again” to the point that she  memorised entire sections of it. And it also involved adding another impressive American accent to her repertoire. “I love doing accents,” she enthused. “I’m lucky enough to work with Susan Hegarty, who’s a dialect coach I’ve known since ‘Titanic’. She’s brilliant and incredibly thorough.“
 
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In fact, she takes accent preparation to the extreme, and feels lost without it. “I did a film called ‘A Little Chaos’ in which I played an English person, and so I didn’t have Susan,” she laughs. “It was quite weird. I thought, ‘How do I do an English accent, without Susan being here?’ It was quite a strange feeling, and what I did realise that I missed is that so much of the character is bound up in the accent and the process of putting the accent together. Subconsciously, I end up learning all my lines as well. It’s literally like, ‘Where’s my Zimmer frame?’”
 
But despite taking home an Oscar for ‘The Reader’, and receiving critical plaudits for her work for nearly 20 years, Winslet says she hates to watch herself on screen. “I only ever really see anything once,” she says. “It’s hard watching myself on screen – it’s like listening to a recording of your voice. You go, ‘Er, is that me?’”
 
She says her kids recently recorded ‘Finding Neverland’, and asked her what it was about. She made them delete it. “I said, ‘ARGH, why is that even on there? Who recorded it?!’ I’m not a fan.”
 
‘Labor Day’ is in cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: