No more the Kate pretender: Marriage-split Winslet finally ditches her wedding ring (...and her shoelaces)

By Jonathan Petre

Unadorned: Stepping out of a new York cab, with unlaced trainers and without the wedding ring


For months Kate Winslet maintained the appearance that her marriage to director Sam Mendes was still going strong after seven years – even wearing her wedding ring to the Oscars earlier this month.

But now that the pair have formally come clean and admitted they have been separated for months, the actress has appeared in public for the first time without her ring.

The star of Titanic and The Reader stepped out of a taxi in New York without the band she had worn throughout her marriage.

Winslet was also spotted without another accessory – as her dark grey Converse basketball shoes were missing their laces.

That, too, may be a throwback to earlier times, as the trend for wearing unlaced trainers dates back to rappers of the Eighties – most famously New York-based Run DMC.

The fashion has its roots in street crime, as police would often take away the laces of suspects they apprehended to stop them running away.

Winslet, 34, has had a chequered history with jewellery. When she tied the knot with Mendes in an impromptu ceremony on the Caribbean island of Anguilla in 2003, the day was so unplanned that finding rings proved a problem.

She received a ring Mendes had bought her the previous Valentine’s Day, but she had nothing to give him – so the director ended up buying his own band.

Kate also raised eyebrows when she took to wearing a gold band given to her by Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio next to her wedding ring.

He gave it to her on completion of the film Revolutionary Road, in which they were both directed by Mendes. She told reporters at the time: ‘It is engraved on the inside – but I’m not going to tell you what it says.’


Symbolic: Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes at a 2009 Oscars party


The married couple were said to have quarrelled on the set of the 2008 box office flop which, coincidentally, was about a woman whose seven-year marriage was ending.

At the time, Mendes said he was interested in depicting the point in a marriage ‘when you have to throw in your towel and say, “This is actually my life. What happens when you think you’ve done it wrong?”’

Winslet, meanwhile, confessed that having her husband direct her in sex scenes with DiCaprio was ‘weird’.


On the red carpet at this year's Oscars- still wearing her wedding ring, despite having separated


Both Mendes and Winslet said they discovered previously unknown sides to the other during the filming of the domestic drama.

When they announced their separation, the couple said it was ‘entirely amicable and by mutual agreement’.

But Winslet was reportedly irritated by 44-year-old Mendes’s friendship with 27-year-old actress Rebecca Hall, daughter of theatre director Sir Peter and singer Maria Ewing.
The couple are, however, still sharing their main family home in New York, a converted six-floor warehouse on West 22nd Street.

But while Kate and her children remain in the three-bedroom, three-storey flat at the top of the building, Mendes has been living in what used to be his office below.

The couple have a son, Joe, who was born seven months after their 2003 wedding while Kate also has a daughter, Mia, nine, from her first marriage to the film director Jim Threapleton.


source: dailymail