Celebrity / Kate Winslet Why the Winslet-Mendes Breakup Hits So Hard Divorcing Oscar winners seemed like regular folks By Marie Morris, Newser Staff Posted Mar 16, 2010 2:17 PM CDT Copied Kate Winslet and her awards for “Revolutionary Road” and “The Reader” at the Golden Globes, Jan. 11, 2009, in Beverly Hills. Her husband, "Revolutionary Road" director Sam Mendes, is at right. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) News that a famous actress and her famous director husband are splitting up is hardly unfamiliar, but when the couple is Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes, the gossip feels somehow personal. She's "normally indifferent to celebrity entanglements," Irin Carmon writes, but "they were an upper-middlebrow (lower-highbrow?) couple you didn't have to feel bad about ogling, because they seemed both brilliant and normal." "Can you blame me for being disappointed it wasn't as perfect as it seemed?" Carmon writes for Jezebel. The Oscar-winning actress was open about favoring domesticity over glamor, and her Oscar-winning husband even took 4 years off after their son was born, explaining, "I just don't want to go away." Writes Carmon: " How cruel to have it proven to us how little, after all, we really knew about them—how little you can know about any marriage or relationship from the outside." (More Kate Winslet stories.) Report an error