It’s Back to Britain for Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet is London bound! After several years in New York City, the Oscar-winning actress is said to be heading back to her native England next year so that her children can be closer to their father, English film director Sam Mendes, The Daily Mail reports.

The 35-year-old Winslet has been filming the Steven Soderbergh-thriller Contagion in Chicago and announced her separation from Mendes in March. Word on the street is that her estranged Academy Award-winning hubby will helm the 23rd James Bond installment, The Hunger Games.

“Sam is doing the next Bond film, all being well, and we’ll all be in England if that happens,” Winslet said exclusively. “It’s such a massive commitment for him and it’s not fair for him to commute backwards and forwards to New York from London. It would be impossible. The children will be there with me.”

How cool is it that Winslet and Mendes still get on so nicely? It’s even better for their two children, seven-year-old Joe and ten-year Mia, Winslet’s daughter with filmmaker Jim Threapleton. But before she and the kids venture to the UK, Winslet will whisk her family off to France where she’ll begin work on Roman Polanski‘s adaptation of Yasmina Reza‘s three-time Tony Award-winning play, God of Carnage.

Would Winslet ever team up with her husband again (he directed her in 2008′s Revolutionary Road)? Winslet added: “We’re really good friends and have very good respect for each other. I can see it, but you’d have to ask Sam what he thinks.”

So I guess this means there’s not much of a chance that Winslet will rekindle things with her model boyfriend, the cute Louis Dowler, with whom she broke up with in November.