Kate Winslet goes on gardening leave

By Baz Bamigboye for the Daily Mail

Published: 18:06 EDT, 17 January 2013 | Updated: 03:41 EDT, 18 January 2013

Kate Winslet has stepped in to help her friend Alan Rickman make a love story about two gardeners.

Rickman had been trying to shoot the movie — about rival landscape gardeners commissioned by Louis XIV to create a fountain at Versailles — for years.

He first told me about the film, A Little Chaos, a couple of years ago and explained how he’d been working with writer Alison Deegan on the script since around 2007.

Grand designs: Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts will star in Alan Rickman's film

Rickman said he had spent a lot of time scouting locations, revising the script and trying to cast the film.

But now he’s found his two leads and everything in the garden is looking rosy, with filming set to begin in the spring.

Kate — who appeared with Rickman in Ang Lee’s 1995 film Sense And Sensibility, which had an Oscar-winning script by Emma Thompson — will play a garden designer who is disdained by a rival landscaper, played by Matthias Schoenaerts.

He’s the hot Belgian actor who starred with Marion Cotillard in Rust And Bone.

Kate spent time making pies and plucking chickens when she starred in the hit HBO series Mildred Pierce, but now she’ll have to start studying the art of planning a fine garden.

The Heiress takes flight

Jessica Chastain has a secret way of coping with her jet-setting

Jessica Chastain has come up with her own method for coping  with all the travelling she has to do at the moment.

The actress is appearing on Broadway, opposite former Downton Abbey leading man Dan Stevens, in a revival of The Heiress.

However, her run in the play has coincided with the awards season, in which she has been nominated for her searing portrait in Zero Dark Thirty of a CIA analyst at the very heart of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Last Thursday she flew from New York to LA and arrived in time to pick up the best actress statuette from the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.

She took a flight back to Manhattan, did further performances in The Heiress, and then on Sunday, as I took a stroll down the Golden Globe red carpet at the Beverly Hilton, there she was again.

This time in a sea-foam green Calvin Klein couture gown. Jessica duly won the best dramatic actress award (Jennifer Lawrence took the best comedy or musical actress honour, and the pair will go head to head in the Oscars).

Later, I bumped into her as she was heading to the NBC-Universal after party.

How on earth, I wondered, did she cope with the constant air travel?

‘It’s a fail-safe system,’ Jessica told me. ‘I take a Tylenol PM pill [a U.S. brand of painkiller] and wash it down with a glass of champagne. I sleep the whole way. And that’s my secret,’ she said smiling and giving me a little curtsey.

The Heiress’s limited run ends on February 10 — the same day as the Baftas in London. That might be a flight too far.

But Jessica has plenty of time to make the Academy Awards on February 24.

Watch out for...

Ewan McGregor will play one of the leads in the film version of John Le Carre¿s Our Kind Of Traitor

Ewan McGregor, who will star in Son Of A Gun, a film about a notorious bank robber who breaks out of jail in Perth, Western Australia (land of my in-laws). Director Julius Avery starts shooting next month.

Then Ewan will play one of the leads in the film version of John Le Carre’s Our Kind Of Traitor, which will be directed by Justin Kurzel, who made Snowtown (about an Australian serial killer).

Elisabeth Moss, who stars as a detective in Jane Campion’s marvellous TV film series Top Of The Lake. Set in a remote, picturesque community in Queenstown, New Zealand, Moss’s special unit officer explores the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl who is five months pregnant.

Peter Mullan plays the girl’s drug lord father, with Holly Hunter as leader of a lakeside commune where women go to repair broken hearts.

I’ve seen two episodes of the gripping six-part murder mystery, which is being shown in its entirety at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday. It’s a co-production between BBC2, the Sundance Channel, See-Saw Films and local NZ and Australian production companies.

Heather Headley, who stars with Lloyd Owen in The Bodyguard, which has turned into a mammoth hit at the Adelphi Theatre with an advance of more than £4 million. Tickets are on sale through to September 28.

Steve Coogan gives one of his best performances as Soho tycoon Paul Raymond in Michael Winterbottom’s film The Look Of Love — an ironic title, because it’s about a family who couldn’t find it.

Working from a screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh, Winterbottom explores what made Raymond tick. The porn king saw himself as someone who took on the hypocrisy of the Establishment.

But the director also uncovers the heartbreak of Raymond’s family. Anna Friel as his wife, Imogen Poots as his daughter and Tamsin Egerton as long-term mistress Fiona Richmond are all superb.

The movie is being shown at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday.