Oscar-winning couple Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes have announced they are to separate after six years of marriage.The couple married in 2003, two years after Mendes won an Academy Award for directing his first film, American Beauty.
Born in Reading, Berkshire in 1975, Kate Elizabeth Winslet began acting in the BBC's children's science fiction serial Dark Season in 1991.
Titanic, which also starred Leonardo DiCaprio, is Winslet's most famous film
Just three years later, in 1993, that she moved to the big screen, landing the role of Juliet Hulme in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures.
That was followed in 1996 by Sense and Sensibility, a Jane Austen adaptation that proved to be a financial and critical success.
Winslet scooped a Bafta for her performance as the flighty Marianne Dashwood, which also saw her nominated for her first Oscar.
In 1997, her role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron's Titanic made her an international star.
The massive box-office hit went on to win 11 Oscars.
But the success was overshadowed by the death of Winslet's partner of five years - actor and writer Stephen Tredre - from bone cancer, shortly before the film's release.
The actress missed the Los Angeles premiere of Titanic to attend his funeral, a decision which imbued her with a distrust of Hollywood.
"Someone I had spent four and a half years of my life with had just died," she told The Guardian in 1999, "and [the film studio] would be having conversations with me, saying things like, 'Look, we understand, this must be a very hard time' and then they'd go on to say, 'but don't you think Stephen would have wanted it?'"
"I was pretty alarmed by that."
Mendes and Winslet married in May 2003 on the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean.
Their son, Joe Alfie Winslet Mendes was born in December in New York.
Winslet's ability has not been the only focus of press attention over the years.
In 2007, she accepted an undisclosed settlement from Grazia magazine over allegations that she had visited a diet doctor.
And last year, the actress successfully sued the Daily Mail newspaper over claims she lied about her exercise regime.
She accepted £25,000 in damages.
The statement was issued after the actress flew to Mexico with her two children, one by Mendes, the other from her previous marriage to director Jim Threapleton. Mendes was with friends in New England. His Bridge Project theatre company had finished productions in New York of Shakespeare's The Tempest and As You Like It on Saturday night. ( source: bbc/ indenpendent)
