Why Kate Winslet Believed Getting Divorced Twice Helped Her Children

Actor Kate Winslet has had a couple of high-profile marriages and break-ups over the course of her career. But ultimately, she felt going through divorce gave her children good lessons about life.

Why Kate Winslet felt going through a divorce was important to her children

Winslet went through two marriages before finding the current love of her life. She was married to filmmaker Jim Threapleton from 1998 to 2001. Afterwards, she was married to Revolutionary Road filmmaker Sam Mendes from 2003-2011. The actor’s chosen to keep the reasons for both of her divorces a secret for the sake of privacy.

“No one really knows what has happened in my life. No one really knows why my first marriage didn’t last; no one knows why my second didn’t. And I’m proud of those silences,” she once told the Wall Street Journal.

But she has confided that, as is the case with most break-ups, her divorces haven’t been easy to deal with.

“I know lots of people who are not in the public eye who have gone through several marriages, I really do, and it’s just those are the cards that life dealt me,” she said. “I didn’t plan on it being that way. And f*** me, it hasn’t been easy, you know.”

But she did think the situation served as an important lesson for her children. The actor shares three children with the three different husbands she’s had over the years. She felt her divorces showed her kids that life wasn’t always easy.

“I think it’s very important to teach your children to struggle on some level,” she once told Harper’s Bazaar. “I would honestly say I wouldn’t change a thing. Even all the bad bits. It doesn’t matter how [bad] times have been, they all matter, because those things shape who you are. And if you don’t like who you are, well, then you’re f***ed really, aren’t you?”

Kate Winslet explained how her children helped her ‘soldier on’ through divorce

Winslet’s kids played a pivotal role in helping the actor cope with her divorces. Granted, the actor did have moments where she allowed herself to be vulnerable.

“I’ve had to remind myself to have those moments of being able to have a good cry, but it did take someone putting their hand on me, a gay male friend, actually, who put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘It’s OK, you can cry about this, and maybe you should’,” Winslet said in a 2010 interview with Harper’s Bazaar (via NDTV).

At the same time, the Oscar-winner credited her children for giving her the strength to endure the hard times.

“As a woman, especially when you have children, one gets so good at soldiering on almost too good. Because you know what it’s like as soon as you open that can of worms, it’s so big, you wish you’d never taken the goddamn lid off,” she said.

But the actor wanted to make sure that her divorces didn’t affect her children the same way they affected her.

“I so wish that that wasn’t the case, that that hadn’t happened in my life, but it has. So I will make the best of it,” she said.

Kate Winslet has had her longest marriage with her current husband Edward Abel Smith

Winslet’s third marriage seems to be the one she’s been waiting for. Unlike her first two husbands, her husband Edward Abel Smith has no connection to the film industry. He was more of a businessman, and known as the nephew to Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson. The pair met while visiting Branson’s mansion in 2011. Circumstances led to the mansion famously catching fire, and Winslet helping Branson’s mother escape the flames safely. The house fire seemed to have brought the two closer.

“I believe strangers can meet and their lives can change so much that they simply can’t go back to being the person they once were,” she said to People in 2017. “[Smith and I] very much went through that together. Even now, I often times find myself looking for an item of clothing or a book or something and I go, ‘Where have I put that?’ And Ned will look at me and go, ‘Did it get burnt in the fire?’”

After establishing their relationship, the two wasted no time getting married, and wedded in a private ceremony in 2012. The couple will soon have been together for 12 years, and it seems to be Winslet’s longest, and happiest, marriage to date.