So why can't Kate Winslet make her marriages work?

By Alison Boshoff for the Daily Mail
Updated: 07:03 EDT, 16 March 2010

Word has it that she isn't - by Hollywood standards, anyway - a diva. And there's no doubt in anyone's mind that she's a great mother, as well as a great beauty. So why is it that Kate Winslet's romantic history has been so dismal?

To discard one husband (less successful, less glamorous) may be considered par for the course as a rising star moves up the movie ranks, but to lose two in the space of a decade is perhaps rather unfortunate.

People who know - and like - Kate Winslet say, by way of explanation, that she is every bit as intense off screen as she is on it. 

Split: It has been obvious since last spring that all was far from well between Kate and Sam Mendes

She is 'fierce' in an argument and is a woman of stubborn loyalties and intense passions - you are either within her inner circle or she never wishes to speak to you again.

'There's nothing that Kate loves more than a roll-up cigarette and a good row,' says one who has known her since she was a teenager.

And it has been obvious since last spring that all was far from well between her and Sam Mendes: Unusually, for Kate, she has sat on her feelings - it has taken the best part of a year for them to admit to their separation.

The signs were there, however, for all to see: She failed to thank him when she won her Bafta for The Reader - an omission she was careful to make up at last year's Oscars, which he attended with her.

During this year's awards season, she was notably pale and thin. She did not go to any of the post-Oscars parties, and clung closely to her beloved father Roger during the Baftas melee. There was no sign of Sam whatsoever, his absence explained away by the fact that he was 'busy' elsewhere.

Signs were there: Kate did not thank her husband Sam when she won a Bafta in 2009 for The Reader - but did acknowledge him later when she got her Oscar for the role (above)

Kate, on the other hand, appears to have done her utmost to support her husband - publicly, at least - and right from the very start of their relationship.

When they had been together only a short while in 2001 she attended the premiere of his film The Road To Perdition even though it meant crossing the Atlantic and back in a day so she could return to her movie.

'It's called being a committed girlfriend,' she said that night, albeit with a detectable wince. Even at that early stage, there was already a strong indication that Kate was the one doing the running in the relationship.

For although we may think of Kate Winslet as a great catch - Oscar-winning star, a leading lady of true talent - in the movie world there has always been a great deal of buzz about Sam Mendes, and the reality is that from the word go, Kate has had to work hard to keep up.

Before they met - at a barbecue thrown by Emma Thompson late in the summer of 2001 - Mendes had a reputation as a commitment-shy ladies' man. Both Rachel Weisz and Calista Flockhart had long relationships with him, neither of which led to marriage, nor engagement, nor anything close.

Kate being Kate, she went for Sam with gusto, moving to New York to be with him - even though the situation with her small child Mia, and Mia's need to see her father, Kate's first husband Jim Threapleton, made this awkward.

They were married in Anguilla when she was around eight weeks pregnant with their son Joe. At the time, they were talking about taking a year off and going travelling together, taking in India and Australasia - not a path most career-focused actresses would contemplate, but Kate loved Sam deeply.

The word is that despite her best efforts, Kate failed to 'tame' Sam Mendes as she had hoped, and she is said to have found it tiring to be the one that had to keep on trying so hard to maintain his interest in both her and their marriage.

I was told last year that Sam was unamused by her habit of flirting with her leading men, but it has been suggested that both parties are afflicted by something best described as a roving eye, which is perhaps why the separation has been described as 'amicable' with each party equally at fault.

And then there is what is being referred to as the Eyes Wide Shut factor - just like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman before them, their marriage foundered when the two of them worked together.

The 2008 movie Revolutionary Road, about a warring couple in a loveless marriage and the soured American dream, is an apposite metaphor for the Winslet-Mendes marriage. It was Kate who found the script and suggested that they make the movie. The fact that it was a rare critical and commercial flop for them both was unnerving, and it seems that working together, with Mendes directing his wife's sex scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio, was equally unsettling.

Kate and her first husband Jim Threapleton, pictured on their wedding day in 1998

Mendes told an interviewer that while making it: 'I saw a side of my wife that I just didn't know.' While Winslet said: 'It was just as if the puzzle piece of who my husband really is slotted into place'.

That comment could easily be interpreted two ways, but with the benefit of hindsight, it suggests that the experience of having a mirror held up to their marriage wasn't a pleasant one.

What we can say is that while she gave up on Jim Threapleton pretty fast, she has definitely worked hard to try to keep this marriage intact.

You would hope so too - two children by two men before the age of 34 is not quite Ulrika Jonsson territory, but it's enough to make you wonder what it is that Kate wants.

And as their separation is announced, that is the big question that everyone is asking: What does Kate actually want - and, moreover, will she ever find it?

What she most certainly does not need is someone tender and quiet like Jim, nor a powerhouse of charm and connections like Mendes. Perhaps what she really needs is someone who will partner her just as her delightfully eccentric father Roger partners her mum.

Roger, a jobbing actor who sings in a punk band, is neither conventional nor successful, but he has always done everything he could to look after his brood of girls - he delivered mail seasonally to help make ends meet, and cleaned pools and did other odd jobs.

Perhaps Kate just hasn't met the man yet who can measure up to her ideals of familial devotion?

On her Jack Jones: Has Kate just not yet found a man who can live up to her idea of familial devotion?

Whatever the future holds, in the short term it is Kate's love for her children that will see her through. She calls Mia her 'little mate' and has often told interviewers how she breastfed both Mia and Joe. Some of this was a knee-jerk reaction to the way she was portrayed after she and Jim split, when she went from being perceived as a down-to-earth sweetheart to strumpet.

The way she dumped Jim was certainly sudden. She gave up their marriage so quickly it was almost impulsive - one week she loved him more than life itself, the next she announced coolly: 'Jim and I are getting a divorce.' She just decided that she was done and that seems to have been that.

This time around, however, the dawning realisation that she and her husband are no longer compatible seems to have been a longer and more painful process.

Kate, intense and sincere, does appear to have been desperate to make it work, but no amount of reheating via romantic holiday and date nights would persuade this soufflé to rise again.

Maybe Mendes, hailed as a directorial wunderkind but now slightly lost, found it harder to deal with her successes than has been supposed?