"The way she conducts herself in this sort of lonely life of hers is not something that at face value I could really understand."

Kate Winslet talks about her role in "Little Children":

[S]he confirmed that Sarah, a neglected wife and a disaffected mother, was not an easy fit, especially for an actress who believes “it’s important to learn to love the person that you’re playing.”

“Sarah,” she said, “has some qualities that I didn’t necessarily respect or like. The way she conducts herself in this sort of lonely life of hers” — having a torrid affair with an equally unhappy stay-at-home father, played by Patrick Wilson — “is not something that at face value I could really understand.”

... [S]he was thrown by the character’s willingness to stay put in a bad marriage — Ms. Winslet herself quickly bailed out of her first marriage, to James Threapleton, then an assistant director, before settling down three and a half years ago with the director Sam Mendes.

Comparing herself to Sarah, she said: “I cannot sit back and just say, ‘Oh, well, this is my lot.’ If I don’t like something, I go off and I fix it. It was really, really hard for me to dampen down those impulses in myself, and to stop myself being frustrated with her.”

I hear the movie is great, by the way, the best of the year. And I've loved Kate Winslet since her first movie, one of my all-time favorites, "Heavenly Creatures." But I was motivated to break out that passage because I'm fascinated by the divorcee's contempt for the woman who stays in a bad marriage and chooses the problematic form of self-expression that is adultery.