Kate Winslet

Kate Elizabeth Winslet CBE born 5 October 1975 is an English actress. She is particularly known for her work in period dramas, and often portrays angst-ridden women. Winslet is the recipient of various accolades, including three British Academy Film Awards, and is among the few performers to have won Academy, Emmy, and Grammy Awards.

Born in Reading, Berkshire, Winslet studied drama at the Redroofs Theatre School. Her first screen appearance, at age 15, was in the British television series Dark Season (1991). She made her film debut playing a teenage murderess in Heavenly Creatures (1994), and received her first BAFTA Award for playing Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1995). Global stardom followed soon after with her leading role in the epic romance Titanic (1997). It was the highest-grossing film of all time to that point, after which she eschewed parts in blockbusters in favour of critically acclaimed period pieces, including Quills (2000) and Iris (2001), which were not widely seen.

The science fiction romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), in which Winslet was cast against type in a contemporary setting, proved to be a turning point in her career, and she gained further recognition for her performances in Finding Neverland (2004), Little Children (2006), Revolutionary Road (2008), and The Reader (2008). For playing a former Nazi camp guard in the last of these, she won the BAFTA Award and Academy Award for Best Actress. In the 2010s, Winslet played a single mother in 1930s America in the miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), joined the Divergent film series, and portrayed Joanna Hoffman in Steve Jobs (2015). She won a Primetime Emmy Award for the first of these and a third BAFTA Award for the lattermost.

For her narration of a short story in the audiobook Listen to the Storyteller (1999), Winslet won a Grammy Award. She performed the song “What If” for the soundtrack of her film Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001). A co-founder of the charity Golden Hat Foundation, which aims to create autism awareness, she has written a book on the topic, The Golden Hat: Talking Back to Autism (2010). Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009, and in 2012, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Divorcing the film directors Jim Threapleton and Sam Mendes, Winslet has been married to the businessman Edward Abel Smith since 2012. She has a child from each marriage.

Early life and work

Kate Elizabeth Winslet was born on 5 October 1975 in Reading, Berkshire, to Sally Anne (née Bridges) and Roger John Winslet. She is of British descent, and also has Irish ancestry on her father’s side and Swedish ancestry on her mother’s side. Her mother worked as a nanny and waitress, and her father, a struggling actor, took labouring jobs to support the family. Her maternal grandparents were both actors and ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company. Winslet has two sisters, Anna and Beth, both of whom are actresses, and a younger brother, Joss. The family had limited financial means; they lived on free meal benefits and were supported by a charity named the Actor’s Charitable Trust. When Winslet was ten, her father severely injured his foot in a boating accident and found it harder to work, leading to more financial hardships for the family. Winslet has said her parents always made them feel cared for and that they were a supportive family.

Winslet attended St Mary and All Saints’ Church of England primary school. Living in a family of actors inspired her to pursue acting from a young age. She and her sisters participated in amateur stage shows at school and at a local youth theatre, named Foundations. When she was five, Winslet made her first stage appearance as Mary in her school’s production of the Nativity. She has described herself as an overweight child; she was nicknamed “blubber” by her schoolmates and was bullied for the way she looked. She said she did not let this defeat her. At 11, Winslet was accepted into the Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead. The school also functioned as an agency and took students to London to audition for acting jobs. She appeared in a Sugar Puffs commercial and dubbed for foreign films. At school, she was made head girl, took part in productions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and played the lead role of Wendy Darling in Peter Pan. She worked simultaneously with the Starmaker Theatre Company in Reading. She participated in over twenty of their stage productions, but was rarely selected as the lead due to her weight. Nonetheless, she played key roles as Miss Agatha Hannigan in Annie, the Mother Wolf in The Jungle Book, and Lena Marelli in Bugsy Malone.

In 1991, within two weeks of finishing her GCSE examinations, Winslet made her screen debut as one of the main cast members of the BBC science fiction television series Dark Season. Her part was that of Reet, a schoolgirl who helps her classmates fight against a sinister man distributing free computers to her school. She did not earn much from the job, and at 16, a lack of funds forced Winslet to leave Redroofs. To support herself, she worked at a delicatessen. In 1992, she had a small part in the television film Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, an adaptation of Angus Wilson’s satirical novel. Winslet, who weighed 13 stone 3 pounds (84 kg; 185 lb) at the time, played the daughter of an obese woman in it. While filming, an off-hand comment from the director Diarmuid Lawrence about the likeness between her and the actress who played her mother prompted Winslet to lose weight. She next took on the role of the young daughter of a bankrupt self made man (played by Ray Winstone) in the television sitcom Get Back (1992–93). She also had a guest role in a 1993 episode of the medical drama series Casualty.

Career

1994–1996: Film breakthrough

Winslet was among 175 girls to audition for Peter Jackson’s psychological drama Heavenly Creatures (1994), and was cast after impressing Jackson with the intensity she brought to her part. The New Zealand-based production is based on the Parker–Hulme murder case of 1954, in which Winslet played Juliet Hulme, a teenager who assists her friend, Pauline Parker (played by Melanie Lynskey), in the murder of Pauline’s mother. She prepared for the part by reading the transcripts of the girls’ murder trial, their letters and diaries, and interacted with their acquaintances. She has said she learned tremendously from the job. Jackson filmed in the real murder locations, and the experience left Winslet traumatised. She found it difficult to detach herself from her character, and said that after returning home, she often cried. The film was a critical breakthrough for Winslet; The Washington Post writer Desson Thomson called her “a bright-eyed ball of fire, lighting up every scene she’s in”. Winslet recorded “Juliet’s Aria” for the film’s soundtrack. Also that year, she appeared as Geraldine Barclay, a prospective secretary, in the Royal Exchange Theatre production of Joe Orton’s farce What the Butler Saw.

While promoting Heavenly Creatures in Los Angeles, Winslet auditioned for the minor part of Lucy Steele for a 1995 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility, starring and written by Emma Thompson. Impressed by her reading, Thompson cast her in the much larger part of the recklessly romantic teenager Marianne Dashwood. The director Ang Lee wanted Winslet to play the part with grace and restraint—aspects that he felt were missing from her performance in Heavenly Creatures—and thus asked her to practise tai chi, read gothic literature, and learn to play the piano. David Parkinson of the Radio Times considered Winslet to be a standout among the cast, and Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle took note of how well she had portrayed her character’s growth and maturity. The film grossed over US$134 million worldwide. She won the Screen Actors Guild and British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress, and received nominations for the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award in the same category. Also in 1995, Winslet featured in the poorly received Disney film A Kid in King Arthur’s Court.

Winslet had roles in two period dramas of 1996—Jude and Hamlet. As with her Heavenly Creatures part, Winslet’s roles in these films were those of women with a “mad edge”. In Michael Winterbottom’s Jude, based on the novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, she played Sue Bridehead, a young woman with suffragette leanings who falls in love with her cousin, Jude (played by Christopher Eccleston). Roger Ebert believed the part allowed Winslet to display her acting range, and praised her for the defiance she brought to the role. After unsuccessfully auditioning for Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Winslet was cast for the part of Ophelia, the doomed lover of the title character, in Branagh’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. Winslet, aged 20, was intimidated by the experience of performing Shakespeare with such established actors as Branagh and Julie Christie, saying the job required a level of intellect that she thought she did not possess. Mike Jeffries of Empire magazine believed she had played the part “well beyond her years”. Despite the acclaim, Jude and Hamlet earned little at the box office.

1997–2003: Stardom with Titanic and indie roles

Winslet was keen on playing Rose DeWitt Bukater, a socialite aboard the ill-fated RMS Titanic, in James Cameron’s epic romance Titanic (1997). Cameron was initially reluctant to cast her, preferring the stars Claire Danes or Gwyneth Paltrow, but Winslet pleaded with him, “You don’t understand! I am Rose! I don’t know why you’re even seeing anyone else!” Her persistence led Cameron to choose her. Leonardo DiCaprio featured as her love interest, Jack. Titanic had a production budget of US$200 million, and its arduous principal photography was held at Rosarito Beach where a replica of the ship was created. Filming proved taxing for Winslet. She almost drowned, caught influenza, suffered from hypothermia, and had bruises on her arms and knees. The workload allowed her only four hours of sleep per day and she felt drained by the experience. David Ansen, writing for Newsweek, praised Winslet for capturing her character’s zeal with delicacy, and Mike Clark of USA Today considered her to be the film’s prime asset. Against expectations, Titanic went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time to that point, earning over US$2 billion in box-office receipts worldwide, and established Winslet as a global star. The film won 11 Academy Awards—the most for any film—including Best Picture and gained Winslet a Best Actress nomination.

Winslet did not view Titanic as a platform for bigger salaries. She avoided parts in blockbuster films in favour of independent productions that were not widely seen, believing that she “still had a lot to learn” and was unprepared to be a star. She later said her decision ensured career longevity. Hideous Kinky, a low-budget drama shot before the release of Titanic, was Winslet’s sole film release of 1998. She turned down offers to star in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Anna and the King (1999) to do the film. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky tells the story of a single British mother yearning for a new life in 1970s Morocco. Writing for The New York Times, the critic Janet Maslin commended Winslet’s decision to follow-up Titanic with such an offbeat project, and took note of how well she had captured her character’s “obliviousness and optimism”.

Jane Campion’s psychological drama Holy Smoke! (1999) featured Winslet as an Australian woman who joins an Indian religious cult. She found the script brave and was challenged by the idea of portraying an unlikable, manipulative woman. She learned to speak in an Australian accent and worked closely with Campion to justify her character’s vileness. The film required her to perform explicit sex scenes with her co-star Harvey Keitel, and featured a scene in which her character appears naked and urinates on herself. David Rooney of Variety wrote, “Showing the kind of courage few young thesps would be capable of and an extraordinary range from animal cunning to unhinged desperation, holds nothing back.” That same year, she voiced a fairy for the animated film Faeries, and won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for narrating the short story “The Face in the Lake” for the children’s audiobook Listen to the Storyteller.

In Quills (2000), a biopic of the erratic Marquis de Sade, starring Geoffrey Rush and Joaquin Phoenix, Winslet played the supporting part of a sexually repressed laundress working in a mental asylum. Hailing her as the “most daring actress working today”, James Greenberg of Los Angeles magazine praised Winslet for “continuing to explore the bounds of sexual liberation”. She received a SAG Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The following year, she played a fictitious mathematician involved in the cracking of the Enigma ciphers in Michael Apted’s espionage thriller Enigma. Winslet’s character was vastly expanded from a subsidiary love-interest in the novel it was based on to a prominent code-breaker in the film. She was pregnant while filming, and to prevent this from showing, she wore corsets under her costume.

The biopic Iris (2001) featured Winslet and Judi Dench as the novelist Iris Murdoch at different ages. The director Richard Eyre cast the two actresses after finding a “correspondence of spirit between them”. Winslet was drawn to the idea of playing an intellectual and zesty female lead, and in research, she read Murdoch’s novels, studied her husband’s memoir Elegy for Iris, and watched televised interviews of Murdoch. The project was filmed over four weeks and allowed Winslet to bring her daughter, who was six months old at the time, on set. Writing for The Guardian, Martin Amis commented that “the seriousness and steadiness of gaze effectively suggest the dawning amplitude of the Murdoch imagination”. Winslet received her third Oscar nomination for Iris, in addition to BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress.

Winslet’s third film release of 2001 was the animated film Christmas Carol: The Movie, based on Charles Dickens’ novel. For the film’s soundtrack she recorded “What If”, which proved to be a commercial hit; she donated her earnings from it to children’s charities. After a year-long absence from the screen, Winslet starred as a headstrong journalist interviewing a professor on death row in the thriller The Life of David Gale (2003). She agreed to the project to work with the director Alan Parker, whom she admired, and believed the film raised pertinent questions about capital punishment. Mick LaSalle thought the film had muddled the subject and disliked both the film and Winslet’s performance.

2004–2007: Romances, comedies, and Little Children

To avoid typecasting in historical dramas, Winslet sought out roles in films set in contemporary times. She found it in the science fiction romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), in which she played the neurotic and impetuous Clementine, a woman who decides to erase memories of her ex-boyfriend (played by Jim Carrey). Unlike her previous assignments, the role allowed her to display the quirky side to her personality. Gondry encouraged Carrey and Winslet to improvise on set, and to keep herself agile she practised kickboxing. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind proved to be a modest financial success and several critics have regarded it as one of the best films of the 21st century. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone described it as a “uniquely funny, unpredictably tender and unapologetically twisted romance” and found Winslet to be “electrifying and bruisingly vulnerable” in it. A journalist for Premiere magazine commended her for abandoning her “corseted English rose persona”, and ranked it as the 81st greatest film performance of all-time. Winslet considers it to be a favourite among her roles, and she received Best Actress nominations at the Oscar and BAFTA award ceremonies. She has credited the film with marking a turning point in her career and prompting directors to offer her a wide variety of parts.

Winslet was paid £6 million to star in her next release of the year, the drama Finding Neverland. It is about the relationship between J. M. Barrie (played by Johnny Depp) and the Llewelyn Davies boys, which inspired Barrie to write Peter Pan; Winslet played the boys’ mother, Sylvia. Despite her reluctance to star in another period piece, Winslet agreed to the project after empathising with her character’s love for the children. Ella Taylor of LA Weekly found Winslet to be “radiant and earthy as ever” and CNN’s Paul Clinton thought she was “exceptional in a delicate and finely tuned performance”. She received a second Best Actress nomination at that year’s BAFTA Award ceremony. With a box office gross of US$116 million, Finding Neverland became her most widely seen film since Titanic.

In 2005, Winslet took on a guest role in an episode of the British comedy sitcom Extras, starring Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. She played a satirical version of herself in it—an actress, who in an effort to win an Oscar, takes the role of a nun in a Holocaust film. She received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series nomination. Within three months of giving birth to her second child, Winslet returned to work on Romance & Cigarettes, a musical romantic comedy directed by John Turturro, in which she played Tula, a promiscuous and foulmouthed woman. The part required her to sing and dance, and it helped her lose weight gained during her pregnancy. She sprained her ankle while filming one of the dance sequences. Derek Elley of Variety wrote that despite her limited screen time, Winslet had “the showiest role and filthiest one-liners”. Winslet declined an offer from Woody Allen to star in Match Point (2005) to spend more time with her children.

Winslet had four film releases in 2006. She first appeared in All the King’s Men, a political thriller set in 1940s Louisiana, featuring Sean Penn and Jude Law. She played the supporting part of the love interest to Law’s character. The film received negative reviews for its lack of political insight and narrative cohesiveness, and failed to recoup its US$55 million investment. Her next release, the drama Little Children, was better received. Based on the novel of the same name, the film tells the story of Sarah Pierce, an unhappy housewife who has an affair with a married neighbour (played by Patrick Wilson). Winslet was challenged by the role of an uncaring mother, as she did neither understand nor respect her character’s actions. Scenes requiring her to be hostile towards the child actress playing her daughter proved upsetting for her. Having given birth to two children, Winslet was nervous about the sex scenes in which she had to be nude; she took on the challenge to present a positive image for women with what Winslet called “imperfect bodies”. A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that Winslet successfully “registers every flicker of Sarah’s pride, self-doubt and desire, inspiring a mixture of recognition, pity and concern”. With another Academy Award for Best Actress nomination, Winslet, at 31, became the youngest performer to accrue five Oscar nominations.

After Little Children, Winslet played a part she found more sympathetic in Nancy Meyers’s romantic comedy The Holiday. She played Iris, a Briton who temporarily exchanges homes with an American (played by Cameron Diaz) during the Christmas holiday season. The film became Winslet’s biggest commercial success in nine years, grossing over US$205 million worldwide. The critic Justin Chang found the film formulaic yet pleasing, and took note of Winslet’s radiance and charm. In her final release of the year, Winslet voiced Rita, a scavenging sewer rat, in the animated film Flushed Away. Winslet’s sole project of 2007 was as the narrator for the English version of the French children’s film The Fox and the Child.

2008–2011: Awards success

Winslet had two critically acclaimed roles in 2008. After reading Justin Haythe’s script for Revolutionary Road, an adaptation of Richard Yates’s debut novel, Winslet recommended the project to her then-husband, director Sam Mendes, and her Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. The film traces the tribulations of a young married couple in 1950s suburban America. Winslet was drawn to the idea of playing a woman whose aspirations had not been met, and she read The Feminine Mystique to understand the psychology of unhappy housewives from the era. Mendes encouraged DiCaprio and Winslet to spend time together, and she believed the small set they used helped them to develop their characters’ strained relationship. Hailing Winslet as “the best English-speaking film actress of her generation”, David Edelstein of New York magazine wrote that “there isn’t a banal moment in Winslet’s performance—not a gesture, not a word”.

To avoid a scheduling conflict with Revolutionary Road, Winslet turned down an offer to star in The Reader. After her replacement Nicole Kidman left the project due to her pregnancy, Winslet was signed to it. Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Reader is based on Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser and is about Hanna Schmitz, an illiterate Nazi concentration camp guard (Winslet), who has an affair with a teenage boy. Winslet researched the Holocaust and the SS guards. To educate herself on the stigma of illiteracy, she spent time with students at the Literacy Partners, an organisation that teaches adults to read and write. Winslet was unable to sympathise with Schmitz and struggled to play the part honestly without humanising her actions. Despite this, some historians criticised the film for making Schmitz an object of the audience’s sympathy and accused the filmmakers of Holocaust revisionism. Todd McCarthy commended her for supplying “a haunting shell to this internally decimated woman”, and writing for The Daily Telegraph, Sukhdev Sandhu considered her to be “absolutely fearless here, not just in her willingness to expose herself physically, but her refusal to expose her character psychologically”.