The Kate Dictator!

Winslet transforms into a titanic tyrant for her latest role – as an icy European leader

IT IS two weeks since an emotional Kate Winslet won the Leading Actress Bafta for her role in harrowing drama I Am Ruth.

Accepting the award for the featurelength Channel 4 film about the perils of social media, she tearfully described to the audience at London’s Royal Festival Hall the importance of highlighting the ‘painful stories that really do happen to women’.

But within days of her award triumph – where the show also won Best Single Drama – it was back to work for the 47-year-old star, filming a rather different kind of female-led story.

These pictures, taken ten days ago on location for the much-anticipated HBO series The Regime, are the first to show Winslet as Madam Chancellor, the icy leader of a fictional modern European nation.

Dressed in a navy jacket, widelegged trousers and black boots, the Reading-born actress chatted on her phone between takes, her hair dyed white-blonde and pinned up in a 1940s style.

She also wore a necklace featuring the letter ‘E’. It is not clear whether this was part of her costume or a tribute to her husband of 11 years, Edward Abel Smith.

The filming site, Overton Mill in Hampshire, is a former banknote paper mill which closed last year. The star was also seen being driven around in a Rolls-Royce – used as the Chancellor’s ‘official car’, complete with red and blue flags of the fictional state.

The six-part series, created by writerproducer Will Tracy, one of the masterminds behind critically acclaimed series Succession, depicts a year within the palace of a crumbling authoritarian regime. Winslet’s, foul-mouthed Chancellor battles to control her people and prove herself as a credible leader to foreign allies. It also stars Andrea Riseborough, Martha Plimpton and Hugh Grant.