Winslet and Mendes separate after 7 years

BRITISH movie star Kate Winslet has separated from her film director husband Sam Mendes after nearly seven years of marriage, their law firm has said.

The surprise split puts an end to a golden couple of Britain’s show business world, buttressed by matching Oscars and a host of commercial successes and artistic accolades. The pair’s law firm, Schillings, said the split was “entirely amicable and is by mutual agreement”.

Winslet, 34, shot to international stardom on the back of her appearance opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron’s Titanic, and sealed her reputation with an Academy Award for best actress for her role in The Reader in 2009.

Mendes, 44, was already an acclaimed stage director by the time he won an Oscar for directing American Beauty in 1999.

The pair married in a low-key ceremony in the Caribbean in May 2003. It was Winslet’s second marriage. Her first, to British director Jim Threapleton, ended in divorce in 2001.

Winslet has an nine-year-old daughter, Mia, from her marriage to Threapleton and a six-year-old son Joe with Mendes. Schillings’ statement said Winslet and Mendes were “fully committed to the future joint parenting of their children”.

It wasn’t clear whether divorce proceedings have begun.

Winslet career breakthrough came in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, which traced the obsessive relationship between two schoolgirls in 1950s New Zealand.

She went on to run through a number of other stage and film roles – including a memorable turn as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Hamlet – but stardom would not come until Titantic, one of the most commercially successful films in cinematic history.

Winslet met Oxford-educated Mendes the same year she split from her first husband, at a time when the former was still serving as artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse Theatre.

His debut film, American Beauty was a critical success, and he directed his wife in Revolutionary Road, a recent film about a crumbling marriage that reunited Winslet with Titanic co-star DiCaprio.

The film won Winslet a Golden Globe for best dramatic actress, and in her acceptance speech she thanked her husband for pushing her so hard.

“Thank you for directing this film, babe, and thank you for killing us every single day and really enjoying us actually being in such horrific pain,” she said last year.

Mendes said at the time that directing his wife had been one of the best experiences of his life, although he said she liked to discuss the movie 24 hours a day while he preferred to do something else, like watch a baseball game, at night when work was done.

The couple have divided their time between Greenwich Village in New York and a home they have in Gloucestershire in England.