Celebrity partnerships have a habit of imploding in public, with the messy details playing out in tabloids or gossip sites. But actor Kate Winslet and film director Sam Mendes, for all their fame and fortune, were never your typical showbusiness couple.
The pair married in secret and split on the sly. Today the Oscar-winning duo confessed that they had actually ended their relationship some months ago.
The closing credits were confirmed in a brief statement from their lawyer. "Kate and Sam are saddened to announce that they separated earlier this year," said Keith Schilling. "The split is entirely amicable and is by mutual agreement. Both parties are fully committed to the future joint parenting of their children."
Winslet and Mendes have a son, Joe, who was born in December 2003. Winslet also has a nine-year-old daughter, Mia, from her first marriage, to film-maker Jim Threapleton.
The actor and director met in 2001 and married on a whim in May 2003, while on holiday in Anguilla. "We hadn't been planning to do it," Winslet said at the time. "But we thought it was rather a good idea, so we just did it." The couple went on to divide their time between a family home in the Cotswolds and a luxury apartment in New York.
Despite being regarded as the power couple of British film, Winslet and Mendes appeared keen to preserve a sense of normality behind closed doors.
"As a family we do normal things that other families would," the actor told one interviewer. "It's important to us that the children are just regular kids, so we go to the park, kick a ball around, go to a museum, watch a movie together or just hang out at home playing Monopoly."
Originally acclaimed for his stage work, Mendes won an Oscar for directing his debut feature, American Beauty, back in 2000. His other films include The Road to Perdition, Jarhead and the low-budget road movie Away We Go.
After five Oscar nominations, Winslet scooped the best actress award last year for her performance as an illiterate Nazi in Stephen Daldry's drama, The Reader.