Crack in the road

Kate Winslet's relationship crumbled under the strain of working together, write Ben Hoyle and Jack Malvern

When Kate Winslet landed a Best Actress Oscar for The Reader with her sixth nomination last year she knew exactly whom to thank. Shaking with emotion she told the watching world: "I'm so lucky to have a wonderful husband and two beautiful children who let me do what I love and who love me just the way that I am."

She had said much the same thing on lifting a Golden Globe a few weeks earlier for her performance in Revolutionary Road, directed by that husband, Sam Mendes.

She told Mendes: "I can honestly say that I loved every second of working with you and it has made me love you more."

To outsiders they appeared the high-achieving couple who had it all: wealth, the deep respect of their peers, a solid family life out of the spotlight and even the confidence to work together on Revolutionary Road, which anatomised a marital breakdown.

In private their own marriage had been under strain for some time and the couple's lawyers recently announced that they had separated.

Keith Schilling, of the legal firm Schillings, said in a statement: "Kate and Sam are saddened to announce that they separated earlier this year. The split is entirely amicable and is by mutual agreement. Both parties are fully committed to the future joint parenting of their children."

No third party is known to be involved. Rather, in an uncomfortable echo of the film they made together, one of the couple is believed to have yearned for a more exciting lifestyle than the one they had carved out for themselves in Gloucestershire and New York.

Revolutionary Road explores similar territory. Based on Richard Yates's novel, which tells the grim story of April and Frank Wheeler, a married couple in 1950s America who become frustrated with the constrictions of their seemingly comfortable family life, with tragic consequences.

Winslet is understood to have leant heavily on her co-star in the film, Leonardo DiCaprio, for advice in recent months, although there is no suggestion of any romance between the pair. Both actors became huge global stars together as the leads in Titanic in 1997 and have remained close friends ever since.

Winslet's first break into feature films came in 1992 when Peter Jackson cast her in Heavenly Creatures. Her portrayal of a teenager who conspires to murder her friend's mother began a rapid rise to stardom.

A year after Heavenly Creatures was released, she appeared as Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, a role for which she received her first Oscar nomination. Her second nomination came two years later, in 1998, for the lead in Titanic, a film that was the most successful ever until its box office receipts were overtaken by Avatar.

She was Oscar-nominated again in 2002 for the title role in Iris, a biopic of Iris Murdoch, and in 2005 for the lead in Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Her fifth nomination was for Little Children, a story of marital infidelity stoked by meetings at a children's playground.

She and Mendes became an item within two months of Winslet's divorce from her first husband, Jim Threapleton, in 2001. Their first public appearance together was at the premiere of Mendes's film The Road To Perdition, in 2002.

She had celebrated her marriage to Threapleton, an unknown assistant director, in a country pub with sausages and mash. That chimed with her image as a down-to-earth girl who wore Doc Martens, had a boisterous laugh and was unaffected by fame.

Mendes was an altogether sleeker and starrier proposition. He was the golden boy of British theatre and film who had racked up two Olivier awards, a Tony and an Oscar for Best Director by the age of 35 and numbered the actresses Jane Horrocks and Rachel Weisz among his past girlfriends.

They married in a low-key ceremony during a holiday in the West Indies in 2003. Winslet's daughter Mia, from her first marriage, was present, along with three of the couple's friends.

Mendes has self-deprecatingly claimed that it was his talent at cricket, not theatre, that allowed him to walk into a job at Chichester Festival Theatre after achieving a double-first in English at Cambridge University. In 1989, aged 24, he set about transforming the rundown Donmar theatre in Covent Garden, with spectacular results. His first West End production was Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. As soon as 1998, he inspired a column of Hollywood stars to march to the West End by bringing over Nicole Kidman to star in The Blue Room.

A year later he directed American Beauty, his first feature, for which he won an Oscar.

He became, by his own admission, a workaholic. "I don't think I had supper at home for four years," he said last year.

His life changed when he met Winslet. After their marriage in 2003, he spent the next four years concentrating on Joe, the son they had in December of that year and his stepdaughter, Mia. He directed one film, Jarhead, and one play, David Hare's The Vertical Hour, on Broadway. However he had begun to return to his old workaholic habits by the time of his wife's Oscar triumph.

As well as Revolutionary Road he had a second film, Away We Go, awaiting release. His transatlantic theatre company, The Bridge Project, was performing The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale in Brooklyn and preparing to tour Europe, Asia and New Zealand.

A second season of The Bridge Project is under way and the next Bond film, which he is expected to direct, is in pre-production. Various film projects are in development, including adaptations of Middlemarch and Joseph O'Neill's post-9/11 novel Netherland.

Winslet's last acting job was in an as yet untitled comedy directed by Peter Farrelly. She is to play a divorced single mother in the television mini-series Mildred Pierce and is likely to appear in Contagion, a thriller directed by Stephen Soderbergh.

Last week Mendes was in London attending the first night of the play London Assurance. For the time being he has moved into the flat below the family's New York home. - © The Times, London