Entertainment Weekly

(Special Collector’s Issue)

March 1998

By David Hochman

Two years ago in the pages of this magazine, Kate Winslet, then 20, laid out her plans for the future: "I really want to be a Valley Girl in a feel-good American movie," said the third-generation British thespian. Okay, so a three-hour film about people plunging to their deaths in the icy North Atlantic probably wasn’t what she meant. But what’s so amazing about Winslet’s performance in Titanic is that she manages to work in the feel-good component. As the enchanting Rose DeWitt Bukater, the reluctant fiancée of a tyrannical Pittsburgh zillionaire, Winslet is transformed from a tightly wound character into the freest of spirits after finding love and facing unthinkable disaster. Rose’s conversion allows Winslet to move through emotions from frustration, rage, fear, infatuation, and joy to window-steaming lust and four-hankie despair. Plumbing these dark waters is a family thing for Winslet, who earned one previous Oscar nomination for her performance in Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Winslet’s parents are actors, as are both her sisters. Her grandfather ran an actors’ repertory company when he wasn’t practicing dentistry, and her uncle Robert was a lead in the original West End production of Oliver! "We’re all so bloody romantic," she has said of her dramatic brood. "I don’t just see a green tree. It’s ‘Oh, my God, it’s a green tree. Oh, my God, I feel like I’ve been born again,’ you know...And I know that as an actor, I do get…this feeling that I can throw myself outside myself." Or throw herself back in time. Lobbying extra hard for the Titanic part, Winslet phoned director James Cameron: "You don’t understand!" she pleaded. "I am Rose!" And a performance has never smelled so sweet.