NEW YORK − Before “Goodbye June,” Kate Winslet had no grand ambitions to direct a movie.
“I don't know that I even could have done it before this time in my life,” the Oscar-winning actress says over tea on a recent afternoon. “Alongside being a mum, I've always had this (acting) career to juggle as well. The sheer time commitment for a director is just so much more.”
That all changed when Winslet’s 21-year-old son, actor Joe Anders, brought her his script for “Goodbye June” (in theaters now, streaming on Netflix Dec. 24), which he started writing as a college class assignment. The Christmas family drama follows a cancer-stricken matriarch, June (Helen Mirren), as she spends her final weeks in the hospital surrounded by her husband, Bernie (Timothy Spall), and their four grown children, all of whom have unresolved issues between them.
Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough and Johnny Flynn co-star with Winslet in the film, which is partly inspired by the death of her mother, Sally Bridges-Winslet, 71, from ovarian cancer in 2017.
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