Kate Winslet: My marriage to Mendes is finished

ACTRESS Kate Winslet has separated from her film director husband Sam Mendes after six and a half years of marriage, her lawyer confirmed last night.

• Hollywood's famous British couple have been married since 2003. Picture: PA

The British couple split "by mutual agreement" bringing to an end one of the most powerful showbusiness marriages in Hollywood.

Their lawyer Keith Schillings said: "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.

"They ask that the media respect their privacy at this time."

The couple have a six-year-old son, Joe Alfie Winslet Mendes, while Winslet, 34, is also mother to nine-year-old Mia Honey Threapleton, from her first marriage to the film director Jim Threapleton.

Mendes, 44, directed his wife in the 2008 film Revolutionary Road, which won her a Golden Globe for Best Actress.

At the time she said working together was both "a blessing and an added pressure".

Last year Mendes was at Winslet's side as she won an Oscar, after five previous nominations, for her performance in The Reader.

But this year the actress attended the awards ceremony alone.

Last July, Winslet had been expected to attend the premiere of Mendes's film Away We Go at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, but did not attend.

The actress, Mendes said, was back at home in Gloucestershire "looking after the kids".

Winslet and Mendes tied the knot in a secret ceremony in the West Indies in May 2003, during a holiday.

They made their first UK public appearance together in 2002 when they attended the premiere of Mendes's second film, The Road To Perdition.

Winslet had been married for little over three years to her previous husband, but they divorced in December 2001.

Winslet and Mendes became an item within two months of her split from Threapleton.

From Honey Monster to DiCaprio

KATE Winslet won the nation's affection as the modest English actress who went on to capture Hollywood.

She was brought up by "jobbing actors" – father Roger and mother Sally – and her grandparents ran a theatre in her home town of Reading, Berkshire.

The 11-year-old Winslet starred opposite the Honey Monster in a breakfast cereal advertisement,

but she got her big break when she was cast, aged 17, as an obsessive teenager in Heavenly Creatures. A year later, her role in the period drama Sense And Sensibility was rewarded with both a British Academy Award and an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.

But it was her role in the blockbuster Titanic alongside teen heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio that propelled her to stardom and won her an Oscar nomination.