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| On the Set of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind |
November 2009
Movie Entertainment
Jay Stone
People love Kate Winslet because she’s such a great actor, and also because she looks so good doing it. Good in a normal kind of way. “God bless your real breasts,” Oprah Winfrey told her after seeing The Reader, the role for which Winslet won an Oscar – finally, on her sixth try.
A lot of people feel the same way.
Winslet is real in many ways. When someone from Vanity Fair asked if she wanted to win that Oscar, she replied, “You bet your f-----g ass I do,” which maybe isn’t what you would expect from the woman who played Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (Oscar nomination No. 1), but refreshingly honest. She’s just as authentic about her appearance, which is unabashedly womanly, as moviegoers have witnessed in several films including Titanic (Oscar nomination No. 2), one of the first in which she appeared nude.
Nudity appears to come easily to Winslet. “We all have our own personal insecurities, but I’m comfortable; I’m happy being me,” she said, just before winning her Oscar. “I don’t have a desire to show off my body, quite the opposite. But sometimes, it’s part of my job.”
“I’m more comfortable with myself physically as I get older. Bizarrely, because I wouldn’t have expected that if you’d have asked me this question when I was 20.”
Back then, in her 20s, she was just beginning to roll. Born in England on Oct. 5, 1975, to a family of some-time actors – her parents had on-again, offagain theatre careers, but an uncle, Robert Bridges, had some success in his role as Mr. Bumble in the original West End production of Oliver! Winslet’s first big part, at age 11, was in a commercial for Sugar Puffs cereal. Her breakthrough movie role came when she was 17, as a young killer in the true-life drama Heavenly Creatures (1994).
Then came her Jane Austen movie, followed shortly after by Titanic. Suddenly, this womanly new actress was hot. She was offered the leads in Shakespeare In Love – which would win an Oscar for Gwyneth Paltrow – and Anna and the King. Instead, she went off to make two offbeat films: Hideous Kinky, about an unconventional Englishwoman who moves to Morocco, and Holy Smoke, about another unconventional Englishwoman who has to be deprogrammed from a cult.
It was beginning to look as if Winslet was, well, unconventional, although Hideous Kinky may have had an ulterior motive. She ended up marrying the director, Jim Threapleton (they divorced a few years later).
More to the point was that she was versatile. She could be the young Iris Murdoch in Iris (2001), opposite Judi Dench – both nominated for Oscars for playing the same role, just as she and Gloria Stuart were nominated for playing young and older versions of Rose in Titanic – or a lovelorn English girl on an American vacation in The Holiday (2006), with equal facility.
All along, she was piling up Oscar nominations: she was the youngest ever to get two, four, five and six (she missed out on three, by a few months, to Natalie Wood).
And she was different in every movie; in 2008 she was, persuasively, a lonely and unhappy housewife in 1950s suburban America in Revolutionary Road, a role that reunited her with Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio and won her a Golden Globe award for best actress in a drama. Winslet is married to the film’s director, Sam Mendes, whose appreciation for her skill is a mixed blessing: he said he couldn’t stand watching her love scenes with DiCaprio.
It was a tricky role for Winslet as well: she told reporters, “I’ve always thought I left my work at work, but I don’t at all. I completely bring it home. So I really needed to talk about it. We’d come home and I’d still be full of ideas I wanted to discuss with Sam. And he’d say: ‘We have to have a system. First, let me take my shoes off. Secondly, let me make us both a cup of tea. And then, why don’t you write down what you want to say?’ ”
The same year, she played a lonely and illiterate former Nazi guard in The Reader, a role for which she researched the role of SS guards and attended meetings of illiterate adults. There was nakedness, but it was part of the film, designed to show the character as an actual person. That role won her the Golden Globe award for best supporting actress – scoring an acting double header for those awards – and, of course, won the long-overdue Oscar.
As Oprah Winfrey might have said, God bless her real talent.
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