Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet Introduction

Kate Elizabeth Winslet (my favourite) is a five-time Academy Award-nomnated, Emmy Award-nominated, BAFTA, Grammy, and SAG Award-winning English actress. She is noted for having played a wide range of diverse characters over her career, but is probably best know for asking Leonardo DiCaprio to “paint her like one of his French girls” in Titanic. And someone said James Cameron didn’t have a romantic side…

Kate Winslet Life story

Kate Winslet was born in Reading, Berkshire, England to Roger John Winslet, a swimming-pool contractor, and Sally Ann Bridges, a barmaid. Her parents were also actors, which explains why a pool contractor and barmaid have such fancy names.

Winslet's career began on television, with a co-starring role in the BBC children's sci-fi serial Dark Season in 1991. This was followed by appearances in the made-for-TV movie Anglo-Saxon Attitudes in 1992 and an episode of the medical drama Casualty in 1993, also for the BBC. This proves that by the early ‘90’s, British television had expanded beyond documentaries on cheese making.

Her film career took off with praise and recognition in 1994 when she starred in a joint leading role, as Juliet Hulme in director Peter Jackson’s critically acclaimed Heavenly Creatures, playing a vivacious and imaginative teen who helps her best friend murder her mother when they are not allowed to be together. “Vivacious” and “imaginative” are certainly two adjectives that first come to mind when one thinks of “murdering teen.”

This role was followed by work in Sense and Sensibility, and then Titanic, which has received enough coverage, so we won’t talk about it. For a time, she was given the nickname “Corset Kate,” which is, hypothetically speaking, a lot better nickname than, say, “Stupid.” She’s managed to shake the “Corset Kate” nickname (and avoid “Stupid” altogether) with a career of very carefully chosen films, except perhaps with the Cameron Diaz vehicle, The Holiday, which we all know was a “mortgage job” for many involved.

Winslet and her husband, director Sam Mendes, currently reside in New York City. They also own a manor house in the tiny village of Church Westcote near Stow-on-the-Wold, which must be about the most British sounding place on the planet.

Kate Winslet Oscars 2009

Kate won Best Actress for her performance in the movie The Reader (2008).