Kate Winslet has opened up about her unusual Christmas arrangement with one of her ex-husbands.
The star has revealed that she and her first husband Jim Threapleton are so close, they spend Christmas together with their blended families. She and Jim married in 1998 but divorced in 2001, before their daughter Mia had reached her first birthday.
Now the Titanic actress, who also has son Joe with second husband Sam Mendes and son Bear with third husband Edward Abel Smith, says they have quietly shared Christmas together for years. "There's no tension at all," she explained. "And I think that we're all very fortunate to be grown-ups who care entirely about children being happy.
"For the majority of the last eight years, my daughter's dad and his lovely wife, who I'm just so grateful to have in my life, and their two children, we've all had Christmases together. For his daughters, who are 12 and 15, it's now weird if they aren't with us."
Speaking to Fearne Cotton for her Happy Place Podcast, she added: "Actually, Mia's dad and I cook Christmas dinner sometimes. I know. I haven't ever actually talked about that because we just get on with it.
"You can just stop and say, OK, enough is enough. You know, the future is not in the past. Let's crack on. I learned that a very long time ago. And it's been a blessing to have sort of landed on this path and for it to be, quite honestly, as easy as it is."
Mia is now 25 and an actress who won plaudits after appearing alongside her mother in Channel 4 drama I am Ruth. Kate said that the friendly festive arrangement suited them all very well. "I think there's a sort of a strange fascination in the media when people who are in the public eye have separated, there's sort of a huge flurry of excitement around, oh my God, they get on. Of course we bloody do! Yeah, we've got kids together."
She described Jim's wife Julie as "a spectacular lady" adding: "I just feel so grateful to have had her as Mia's stepmother. There's something extraordinary about another mother in the world, loving your child the same way that you do. And I just feel incredibly grateful to have that. It's a real lesson, actually, I think as a mum, having gone through situations where I have separated from my children's fathers, as the matriarch, we do have the ability to make it OK for everybody."
The actress lost her own mother in 2017 and said that her current role as an actor, producer and director on Goodbye June, starring Helen Mirren and written by her son Joe, 21, had brought back memories. "It wasn't necessarily cathartic, but there were days when I was literally reliving what happened when I lost my own mum, even though our film is fictional.
"I did feel very vulnerable because it did bring all that stuff up. And actually in this country, I don't think we're very good at talking about loss. I don't think we're very good at processing grief." She said despite being "exhausted" by the amount of work the seven-week shoot for the film involved, she had "loved it".
"I felt proud of myself, as a woman, at this time of my life. I'd just turned 50 and to be doing something that I watched so many men do before and I'd seen male actors transition into directing really successfully and largely without any judgement or scrutiny and it's just not the same for girls. It really brought me so much joy to do something that I've never done before.
"I felt so uplifted - and I truly experienced, I think, more than ever in my life, real fulfilment and a sense of achievement because I had to pull off a lot in a short space of time." Goodbye June, which also features Timothy Spall and Toni Collette, launches on Netflix on December 24.