Entertainment Weekly : Your Guide to the Oscars
January 28, 2005
Best Actress : Kate Winslet
At just 29, Kate Winslet earned an impressive fourth career nomination for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, besting the late great Marlon Brando, who didn’t earn his fourth nod till age 30.
“Check me out! Wow! I grew up in a small town outside of London. This kind of stuff isn’t supposed to happen to people like me,” says Winslet, adding that her husband, director Sam Mendes, “was reminding me this morning, ‘Don’t you remember the first week of shooting?
You were panicked, you couldn’t sleep, you thought that everything you were doing was terrible. And look what’s happened: You’ve gotten an Academy Award nomination for a part that nearly killed you!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, dammit, that’s right!’”
Best Picture Nominee : Finding Neverland
Should anyone really be surprised that Finding Neerland is a Best Picture nominee?
Let’s see, it stars Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman, and Julie Christie - a group of actors who have 16 nominations among them. It’s directed by Marc Forster, who showed with Monsters’s Ball that he can mine gold-plated performances out of his stars. It’s a bittersweet period piece abotu love, art, and the unquenchable spirit of youth. And it’s an end-of-the-year release from Miramax — a studio that courts the Oscars as if its very survival depended on it. Okay, strike that last one.
Based on a stage play by Allan Knee, Finding Neverland is the loose (some say very loose) story of how Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie created the children’s classic Peter Pan. A world away from the slurry, high-seas shtick of Captain Jack, Depp’s Barrie is a misunderstood eccentric, a boy at heart trapped in a whilly, loveless marriage to a social-climbing wife (Radha Mitchell). But when Barrie forms a touching friendship with the four sons of Winslet’s windowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, he finds the inspiration for his masterpiece about refusing to grow up. “What I liked very much is that it didn’t feel like the kind of movie that you see all the time,” says Depp. “I thought it was sweet and heartbreaking, but in an honest way. It didn’t feel like it was trying to be something, it felt like it was something.”
But Finding Neverland isn’t so much about the creation of Peter Pan as it is about the touching relationship between Depp’s and Winslet’s characters. Depp’s loony grace and Winslet’s sadness and humanity are what stick with you when the theater’s lights go up. After all, Peter Pan may have taught us how to fly, but Finding Neverland shows us actors who know how to soar. - Chris Nashawaty
Posted by: Ruth
Posted in: News > Finding Neverland > Interviews
