In 2017, Sally Bridges-Winslet died of cancer. She was 71. It was, her youngest daughter said, “like the north star just dropped out of the sky”.

It would have been even worse, says Kate Winslet today, had the family not pulled together. “I do have tremendous amounts of peace and acceptance around what happened because of how we were able to make it for her.”

Winslet’s eldest son, Joe, was then 13. “For him as a child, seeing that love poured into this moment was huge. And then he discovered through conversations with friends that that’s so rarely the case.”

Six years later, in 2023, Joe decided to turn the experience into a screenplay. A few drafts and some heavy-duty casting later and it’s a movie, starring Helen Mirren as dying matriarch June, Timothy Spall as her blithe husband, B

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