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Star quality: Kate Winslet at the premiere of Revolutionary Road


The vampish one-shouldered Balmain dress she wore to the movie premiere that December night has been carefully put away, and her comfortable Los Angeles home is still and silent.

But while her husband Sam Mendes sleeps, Kate Winslet wakes and finds she is having a panic attack.

She feels as if she cannot breathe. There is a terrifying sensation that her chest has been compressed by a brick. She cannot see straight and complains, despite the silent room: 'It sounds like everyone's talking in Hebrew.'

She has never had a panic attack before and calls her sister Beth back in Reading.
Beth tells her this period of intense fear and anxiety will pass and suggests her symptoms are just the result of a fierce response from her nervous system.

At the time, Kate blames it on 'tiredness... just tiredness' - although she is truly upset by its intensity, and the feelings of utter terror she has experienced.

The end of a relationship is a common trigger for these episodes and it seems that, at some level, Kate was registering that the pressures which she was facing and fighting daily were pretty much overwhelming.

Maybe in some corner of her psyche she realised her relationship with Mendes was under what might be a fatal threat.

The couple announced their separation on Monday, saying they had quietly split earlier in the year.

According to neighbours, for some weeks Sam, 44, has been living in what used to be his office, which is in the same converted six-floor warehouse on New York's West 22nd Street as the main family home.

Kate, 34, and her children, Mia and Joe, remain in the three-bedroom, threestorey flat on the floor above.

It's very much a home in Kate's image: the walls are hung with paintings by the children and the fridge groans with good-for-you food waiting to be placed into lunchboxes.

The floors are covered with shabby-chic Persian rugs and there are spectacular roof gardens with great views across the Hudson River. It is here Kate always goes to smoke - her one indulgence.

Sam, meanwhile, is in the white-painted flat just downstairs. His space is dominated by a gigantic flat-screen TV and bachelor-style dark-grey sofas.

The walls are lined with his books - reflecting the fact that this Cambridge graduate is constantly reading and never stops looking for appropriately cerebral new projects and enthusiasms.

Should you doubt that the man of the house is an homme serieux, the words 'art' and 'commerce' are spelled out, a tad pretentiously, in metal letters and entwined on a wall.

As their homes reflect, they are such different people. Kate is a passionate 'doer' and a woman of grand, unconditional loves. She cries easily. She is still in many ways afflicted with the self-doubt which came from being the 'fat girl' who left theatre school at 16. She never feels she has read enough or is talented enough.

She cherishes the whispers she sometimes feels she hears from her first boyfriend, actor Stephen Tredre, who died tragically young just as she was tasting fame. She says he speaks to her from beyond the grave when she is feeling down to tell her she is doing fine.

Sam is everything she isn't - effortlessly intellectual, superconfident and with a reputation for being the commitment phobe's commitment phobe.

He sailed through relationships with actresses Jane Horrocks, Rachel Weisz and Calista Flockhart without coming even vaguely close to being tied down.
The only child of divorced parents, Sam has spoken often about not buying into the ideal of monogamy.

'I don't believe in marriage. People from broken homes just don't buy it. The idea of a marriage fills me with dread,' he once said.

He added only last year that the greatest risk he had ever taken was getting married and having children.

For Kate, of course, getting married and having children was always seen as the much-desired happy ending, not some kind of insane gamble.

For now, both hope this apart-yet-together solution to their failed marriage will allow them to gracefully co-parent the children. There is Mia, nine, by Kate's first marriage to Jim Threapleton, and Joe, six, by Sam.


Close: Sam Mendes has befriended young actress Rebecca Hall


They desperately want to remain friends and both plan to stay in New York for the foreseeable future - Kate will be filming, and Sam is trying to put together a movie about cricket.

'It has cost them a lot of anguish to separate, but the marriage has petered out,' I was told this week. 'They just were not able to make each other happy any more. It wasn't an easy decision and they did not make it quickly.'

From the outside, it's hard to believe they were not able to make a go of it. What on earth went so badly wrong?

At the time of her panic attack, at the end of 2008, Kate had never looked more radiantly beautiful.

Seen a few weeks before at a New York screening of The Reader, she glowed with a tan acquired on holiday with Sam and the children and looked a dream in a tight grey Herve Leger dress.

But there were pressures. There was talk that her performances in both The Reader and Revolutionary Road - the latter of which was directed by Sam - were worthy of Oscar nominations. What would happen next?

Kate, it emerges, was desperately anxious about the critical reception to Revolutionary Road and wanted more than anything for this film to be a great success for both of them.

It was the first project they had worked on together and the script was one she had been brave enough to suggest to Sam - brave because she felt habitually modest about her brains next to Sam's much-trumpeted 'brilliance'.

Her bloke-ish, workaholic husband said her role as April Wheeler would be the greatest of her career and assured her the performance he had drawn out of her, as a woman facing the slow death of her marriage, would be the one which would finally bring her an Oscar.

(Sam is not short on self belief: when, at the age of 24, he was directing Dame Judi Dench, the grande dame suggested a change in the way a line was delivered. 'You can try it that way,' breezed Sam, 'but it won't work.')

Kate had struggled, though, to keep faith during the filming of Revolutionary Road. Sam had a habit of coming home after filming and zoning out in front of Sky Sports News.


Hollywood couple: Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet at the world premiere of 'Revolutionary Road' in December 2008


He would have infinite patience for listening to stories about Arsenal Football Club and about cricket, two of his great passions, but seemingly no time for his wife and her professional worries and vulnerabilities.

All of the directors who have worked with Winslet say she is both needy and meticulously prepared when acting. There was a fight at the dinner table in their New York apartment one night. Sam had spent a long rehearsal day doing exploratory character work with her co-stars.

'Sam is brilliant at saying to actors: "Tell me about this character. Does she go to church? What does she think about at 11 in the morning?"' Kate said. 'I kept waiting for my turn.'

It never came. She continued: 'He took it for granted that I was ready, and he said: "I can't talk about [Revolutionary Road] 24 hours a day" - and I just lost it.

I said: "I'm sorry, but you're going to have to. You're my director, and if I wasn't playing April and the actress playing April phoned you, you'd leave your dinner to go cold and take that call for two hours in the other room! I know you would!"'
More than that, it was a harsh shoot for all concerned. Sam wanted to create a claustrophobic atmosphere, so he had a rehearsal period of nearly a month, followed by a shoot which was all in sequence and on location.

The atmosphere seems to have been deliberately horrible: Kate's co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, actually burst into tears when Sam declared 'Cut!' for the final time.

Even as she made the film with Sam, Kate knew her other movie, The Reader, based on the acclaimed novel of the same name, might overshadow it.

She had been asked to replace Nicole Kidman at the last moment (Kidman had become pregnant) and she feared her extraordinary performance as Hanna Schmitz - which she started filming a week after finishing Revolutionary Road - could eclipse her pet project with Sam.

Just as she dreaded, Revolutionary Road was judged inferior - critically and commercially. She was devastated by what happened to Revolutionary Road, and Sam found it difficult to accept, too.

Often hailed as a wunderkind, the man who won the best director Oscar for his first feature film, American Beauty, is not used to failing.

Just as his ego received this blow, Sam began a friendship with 27-yearold actress Rebecca Hall, who was cast in his recent Bridge Project - classical plays cast with U.S. and British actors that ran on both sides of the Atlantic. And as a fellow Cambridge graduate, they seem to have hit it off from the start.

Kate was well aware of the friendship - she came to several of the play's rehearsals in late 2008. Sources insist it never progressed beyond a harmless flirtation, but as Kate tasted great success, and, for once, Sam had to accept walking in her shadow, the dynamic between the couple shifted.

By last spring, they were going through a rough patch obvious enough for it to be the talk of New York and London. Sam supported her publicly at the Oscars, then they retreated from each other.

He made noises about moving the family back to London, saying their parents were of an age when they should.

But Kate felt it was not time yet - and believed Sam was really expressing a broader malaise, which was that he wanted out of their cosy domestic life in New York, and socialising with their bohemian friends like acting siblings Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal.

What a pity. As director Sir Richard Eyre observed: 'Kate's been very, very good for Sam - giving him stability and children. He's become less insulated, more gregarious.'


'Whispers': Kate with ex-partner, script writer Stephen Tredre who died of bone cancer. The couple were together for four years until 1995.


Both made efforts. After winning a Bafta, Golden Globe and Oscar for The Reader (she also won a Golden Globe for Revolutionary Road), she took a year off to concentrate on her family. Everyone insists she wanted to make the marriage work.

But although Kate was no longer making him look smaller professionally, she now took the lead at home. She talked of having 'a fire in me that won't be put out' and of not wanting to be hemmed in or restricted. The relationship started to misfire.

Kate said last year: 'I really rule the roost. I steer the ship. I am constantly making checklists. You know, library books have to go in on Friday, make sure that one day a week the children are not having bread for lunch.'

She added: 'I come from a long line of real carthorses. Very stoic, insidesmadeof-iron people. So I can take any s*** you can fling at me.

'I can cope with any workload. I can deal with lack of sleep. I can multi-task like you've no idea.'

Everyone who knows her says Kate finds motherhood absolutely absorbing and fulfilling and she takes on most family duties.

The children attend a celebrated private school in New York's Greenwich Village, which costs £20,000 a year.

On sunny days, Kate walks them both into school. She never wears make up and is happy to carry their school bags. Sam, in contrast, seldom does the school run.

Could it be that, as Kate relaxed into the daily rhythms of motherhood, she failed to notice she wasn't the most intellectual companion - that her endlessly sociable and well-connected husband didn't want to hear about her home-made hummus?

As Sam became disenchanted with his wife of six years, he discovered what Jim Threapleton had before him: that Kate is a woman who will pull the plug when she has decided a relationship has slid far enough.

As Sam said last summer: 'Kate doesn't over-analyse, she's a doer. When she turns on the ignition it's: "Get out of the way." '

You can only wonder where this determined woman is heading next.


source :dailymail