Kate Winslet

Kate Elizabeth Winslet (/ˈwɪnzlət/; born 5 October 1975) is an English actress. Primarily known for her roles as headstrong and complicated women in independent films, particularly period dramas, she has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, five BAFTA Awards and five Golden Globe Awards. Time magazine named Winslet one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009 and 2021. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2012.

Winslet studied drama at the Redroofs Theatre School. Her first screen appearance, at age fifteen, was in the British television series Dark Season (1991). She made her film debut playing a teenage murderess in Heavenly Creatures (1994), and went on to win a BAFTA Award for playing Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1995). Global stardom followed with her leading role in James Cameron's epic romance Titanic (1997), which was the highest-grossing film at the time. Winslet then eschewed parts in blockbusters in favour of critically acclaimed period pieces, including Quills (2000) and Iris (2001).

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), The Holiday (2006), Revolutionary Road (2008), and The Reader (2008). For playing a former Nazi camp guard in the last, she won the BAFTA Award and the Academy Award for Best Actress. Winslet's portrayal of Joanna Hoffman in the biopic Steve Jobs (2015) won her another BAFTA Award, and she received two Primetime Emmy Awards for her performances in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011) and Mare of Easttown (2021). In 2022, she produced and starred in the single drama "I Am Ruth", winning two BAFTA TV Awards, and played a supporting role through motion capture in Cameron's top-grossing science fiction film Avatar: The Way of Water.

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, Winslet has also written a book on the topic. Divorced from film directors Jim Threapleton and Sam Mendes, Winslet has been married to businessman Edward Abel Smith since 2012. She has a child from each marriage, one of whom is the actress Mia Threapleton.

Kate Elizabeth Winslet was born on 5 October 1975, in Reading, Berkshire, to Sally Ann (née Bridges) and Roger John Winslet. She is primarily of British descent, but 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, the Actors' 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 play. She describes herself as an overweight child, and was called "blubber" by her schoolmates and was bullied for her appearance. She said she did not let this stop her.

At eleven, Winslet was accepted into the Redroofs Theatre School, an independent 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 written by Russell T Davies. 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 age sixteen, 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. During filming, after hearing an off-hand comment from the director Diarmuid Lawrence about the likeness between her and the actress who played her mother, Winslet became motivated 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 (1992–1993). She also had a guest role in a 1993 episode of the medical drama series Casualty.

Winslet was among 175 women 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 learnt 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; Desson Thomson, a reviewer for The Washington Post, 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, written by and starring 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 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 portrayed her character's growth and maturity. The film grossed over $134 million worldwide. She won the Screen Actors Guild and British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress, and received an Academy Award nomination 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 Heavenly Creatures, her 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). The critic 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, she was cast in the part of Ophelia, the doomed lover of the title character, in Branagh's adaptation of the William Shakespeare tragedy Hamlet. Twenty-year-old Winslet was intimidated by the experience of performing Shakespeare with established actors such as Branagh and Julie Christie, saying the job required a level of intellect that she thought she did not possess. Mike Jeffries of Empire believed that she had played the part "well beyond her years". Despite the acclaim, Jude and Hamlet earned little at the box office.

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 likes of Claire Danes and Gwyneth Paltrow, but she pleaded with him, "You don't understand! I am Rose! I don't know why you're even seeing anyone else!" Her persistence led him to give her the part. Leonardo DiCaprio featured as her love interest, Jack. Titanic had a production budget of $200 million, and its arduous principal photography was held at Baja Studios where a replica of the ship was created. Filming proved taxing for Winslet; she almost drowned, caught influenza, experienced 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. Writing for Newsweek, David Ansen commended 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 to that point, earning over $2 billion in box office receipts worldwide, and established Winslet as a global star. The film won eleven Academy Awards—tied for most for a single film—including Best Picture, and earned the 22-year-old Winslet a nomination for Best Actress. She also received Golden Globe and SAG nominations for Best Actress.