Kate Winslet wasn't 'emotionally fit' enough to make film about loss so soon after mother's death

Kate Winslet has admitted she probably wasn't "emotionally fit" enough to make her 2019 film Blackbird so soon after the death of her mother.

The Titanic actress starred alongside Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill and Mia Wasikowska in the drama, which follows a family as they gather over a weekend to say goodbye to the matriarch Lily.

Winslet, who played Lily's daughter, admitted on the Happy Place podcast that she was in no state to be making a film about losing a parent a year after her mother Sally died in 2017.

"It was only a year after I had lost my mother and I look back on it now and I think, 'Oh my God, what was I thinking?! I was in no shape, you know, emotionally fit to be making a film to do with loss at all,'" she told host Fearne Cotton. "But it probably helped me to distract myself from emotions that I was probably wasn't processing efficiently enough in my own life."

She added, "There are things, as actors, we're drawn to entirely subconsciously and it's only in hindsight that it's crystal clear what we must have been emotionally trying to work through when we made that particular choice."

Winslet's latest film, Goodbye June, covers similar ground as it follows a family who gather at the hospital over Christmas to say goodbye to their mother June. The film, directed by and starring Winslet, was written by her son, Joe Anders, and inspired by his experience with his grandmother Sally's death.

Sharing how making the film affected her personally, the Oscar-winning said, "There were days where I was literally reliving what happened when I lost my own mum, even though our film is fictional... I think I did feel very vulnerable because it did bring up all that stuff up."

Goodbye June, also starring Helen Mirren, Toni Collette and Andrea Riseborough, is now streaming on Netflix.