No gloss: swapping her lipstick for chapstick
In her latest role, Oscar-winner Kate Winslet is defying the pressure on women to look beautiful, writes Rebecca Reid
The new HBO/Sky Atlantic series Mare of Easttown is the story of a dead-end town in America where Mare (Kate Winslet) has lived since childhood. She works as the local detective, handling every crime that happens in the area. But when the body of a missing girl turns up in the town creek, the powers that be team Mare up with a cop from the county (you can probably imagine how pleased she is about that).
Despite being yet another high budget murder show, Mare of Easttown couldn’t be more different from Big Little Lies and The Undoing.
Where these dramas put a glossy coating on murder, allowing us to drool over beautiful clothes and jaw dropping real estate while we wonder who did it, in Easttown there is none of that. It’s an unrelentingly bleak story set against an equally unrelentingly bleak backdrop. In fact, the whole world of Easttown is so depressing that it’s a real testament to the show’s and Winslet’s inherent charm that anyone wants to keep watching it.
It’s clear that Winslet has had the time of her life playing Mare. Every interview she gives about it spills over with enthusiasm for the realness of her as a character. And part of that realness is the fact that Mare looks, for lack of a nicer word, rough. For the majority of the first episode (and the first series, if the trailer is to be believed) Winslet wears a variety of plaid shirts with badly fitting jeans and a terrible coat. Her hair is drab, there’s almost no make-up. In short, Winslet looks as bad as it’s possible for a woman so naturally beautiful to look. It’s not just Mare of Easttown, either. Winslet’s other recent role, playing 19th century palaeontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite, was similarly unglamorous — no make-up and the obligatory corset hidden deep under a woollen shawl.
In interviews about the roles she has played recently there is almost a sense of rebellion from Winslet, after an entire career of being made to look as beautiful as possible. She told The Times, while discussing Easttown: “HBO said, ‘Does Kate have to look so . . . ’ “And I said, ‘What, like s*** ? Yes. Kate does have to look like s*** .”’
Back in the early days of Winslet’s career, despite being objectively slim and incredibly beautiful, she was torn to shreds for being “fat” — comments which Winslet has subsequently dubbed “straight up cruel”. Tabloids were littered with remarks about her weight, producers allegedly told her to get thinner if she wanted success. Joan Rivers once said that if Winslet had lost 5lb then both she and Titanic costar Leonardo DiCaprio would have “been able to fit on that door”. Given all the nonsense she had to put up with, Winslet has every right to stick two fingers up at the old standard of having to look beautiful to win roles. If this Oscar-winning, Bafta-winning British acting great wants to swap lipstick for chapstick in dramas like Ammonite and Mare of Easttown, who could blame