Winslet's marriage split evokes empathy for authentic celebrity

It was with only a brief twinge of guilt over waste of newspaper resources that I snaffled a selection of colour prints from the office last autumn, and brought them home to argue with my best friend over which looked best on the front of our fridge.

The prints in question came from a collection of photographs released by British actress Kate Winslet and her husband Jim Threapleton, shortly after the birth of their daughter Mia in October last year.

My favourite showed Winslet, wearing a knitted zip-up top, straight off the peg from Warehouse, staring into the camera with an expression of consuming - if weary - joy, as though at any moment she might throw back her head at the thrill of it all, or burst into tears. Her forehead was touching that of her husband, who was watching intently over the tiny sleeping form of their baby girl, around whom the couple had linked hands. It looked like an advert for love.

So it was with a visceral "thwump" of sadness that I saw the headlines announcing Winslet's separation from the "glorious-looking boy with blue eyes" after three years of marriage.

Silly, of course, to feel sorry about a situation one knows nothing about, involving people one has never met. Embarrassing to be so trivially concerned, on a morning that also brought news of the implosion of the UN Conference on Racism and the continuing row over illegal immigrants.

If we can turn over the page to avoid pictures of famine victims, we must surely be similarly inured to the molasses of celebrity melodrama - manufactured or otherwise - spread thickly across the mass media each day. But empathy is where you find it in these compassion-fatigued times.

The following days will doubtless witness a veritable tsunami of speculation, as the unravelling of the Winslet-Threapleton union is eviscerated for all to see. A spare statement from her publicist on Monday night stated that no other parties were involved, and that their daughter would remain the first priority in what was "an amicable and respectful separation".

Fuelled by her own apparently contradictory remarks in a recent interview with InStyle magazine, in which she said that having a baby had strengthened her relationship, rumour and gossip will wreathe the unhappy couple. Was she too successful? Was there an affair? Were they too young?

And will the public care? Yes, I suspect, and more than usual. Winslet has always stood apart from the celebrity panoply of talents, teases and tragic heroines. A redoubtable actress, she radiates a fearless emotional honesty in person as well as in performance. Intelligent, immoderate and inconsistent, she calls a spade a bloody shovel.

Her rejection of the trappings of superstardom never felt like a pose. Her desire to be seen as natural never overtook her determination to remain complex. She served bangers and mash at her wedding because she wanted to. Winslet has always come across as a creature who runs at life full tilt and, because of that, there will be no schadenfreude now that she has - briefly - fallen flat on her face.

Since any old body can become our intimate tea-break chum via the pages of a celebrity magazine or a few frames of daytime television, we demand authenticity far more than we do aspiration or knowingness. We don't need our stars to share the joke - which is, anyhow, on us, since it's always our money, their pockets.

As we become increasingly confined by the hyper-mediation of the modern world, we crave the authentic far more than the fantasy.

And it's not such a mystery in whom we choose to invest. For all her porcelain perfection and super-couple status, Nicole Kidman's raucous personality was continually slipping out under the wire. Following her divorce from Tom Cruise she has excelled in keeping it - ever more cheekily - real: arriving at a premiere clutching the hands of her best girlfriends, naughty asides about wanting a man who is taller than her, that memorable photograph of her, arms aloft, exiting the divorce lawyer's office for the final time.

Victoria Beckham, whose autobiography Learning to Fly has been hard to avoid this week, may embrace all the fame related attention that Winslet rejects. But there's something gloriously raw about the way she totters from fashion show to football match, giving Naomi what for, loving her man, doting on her son. She revels in her - some would say inexplicable - celebrity entitlement, her lifestyle an extended two-fingers up to the kids at school who laughed at her spots.

Winslet is particularly popular with women. Her beauty is of the friendly variety, and any threat from it is neutralised by her fluctuating weight. Her bravura declarations in favour of cake, interspersed with bouts of weight consciousness, reflect the confusion most women feel about the shape they are, the shape they know they ought to feel comfortable with, and the shape they want.

Her recent post-pregnancy sloughing of four stones, and accompanying comments that her bottom "looked like purple sprouting broccoli", were typical of her approach.

Women were similarly encouraged by her domestic arrangements. Threapleton, whom she met on the set of the film Hideous Kinky, had agreed to stay at home to look after Mia while Winslet pursued her film commitments. Inevitably, it has been alleged that her continuing stardom and her husband's frustration at his own lack of career success put a strain on the marriage.

Yet it seemed like the ideal negotiation - a thoroughly 21st-century determination that men should be as involved in childcare as their partners, and an ego-free acknowledgment of the economic realities of their relationship. We wanted it to work.

And we wanted to be right. Just as we pretend we can differentiate between real and fake celebrities, so we flatter ourselves that we can spot a healthy coupling. Winslet's ordinariness was made more believable by her coupling with non-celeb Threapleton. She was capable of loving outside the bubble, and not hostage to the desperate pair-bonding of the famous.

If growing older involves a gradual winnowing out of dreams, then the first to go are those hopeless, hopeful fancies of everlasting, effortless romance. We replace them with our own hard-learned lessons: that sometimes loving someone madly isn't enough, that the best you can wish for is that a lover will show you kindness, even when they're leaving you.

But watching Winslet's love writ large, we allowed our own more lavish dreams a moment to flex again. And, romantics that we are, we relished the sparkle.