For Kate Winslet Titanic was just the beginning

Marjorie Rosen of Biography Magazine

It would have been easy for Kate Winslet to rest on her Titanic laurels. After all, as Rose, the movie’s heroine, she was so beloved that the Franklin Mint Collection even created a doll in her image. Winslet might simply have gone from Hollywood blockbuster to blockbuster, typecast as the ornamental romantic lead, and made a terrific living.

But from the outset, the actress, headstrong and fearless, was having none of it. “I deliberately did not do the whole Hollywood thing,” she told the New York Times. “I wanted to go to work everyday and know everyone’s name on the set. It sounds a little mystical, but had to look after my soul.”

Which she has been doing ever since, in one small, quirky film after another. And it had paid off, big time. This year she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination—her third, although she is only 26—for her performance as the young Dame Iris Murdoch in the British made Iris, a meditation of life of the acclaimed British novelist. In addition, she is currently co-starring in another modest British film, the romantic thriller Enigma playing a woman who helps a brilliant mathematician break the German communication code during World War II. Since Titanic, Winslet has been campaigning hard for edgy roles like these; she was even willing to screen test for the 1999 Australian made Holy Smoke, and has been happily working for a fraction for what she might have been paid on a blockbuster film.

“What strikes me the most about Kate as an actress is her variety,” says Enigma’s director Michael Apted. “Titanic was a fine piece of work. But it’s just one piece in her whole body of work. The choices she made after that were smart. I’ve always thought that she’s in it for the long haul, and that she’s going to create a very serious body of work a bit like Judi Dench.”

Recently on the Today Show, Winslet talked about her film Iris in which Judi Dench plays the mature Murdoch and Winslet plays the younger. Nothing thrills her more than the comparison with Dench. “I was completely petrified about the idea of playing a young Judi Dench, frankly. And Iris as well. But living up to what Judi is and what Judi can do is pretty tough.”

Winslet has a remarkable headstart. She seems to have a knack for winning the respect of everyone she works with. Billy Zane her arrogant fiancé in Titanic calls her “Kate the Great” and a “Punk Priestess.” Working with her he says, “was like a jam session. You follow the follower. Being completely anchored in what appears to be classical training, she was free as a bird. And able to improvise. She always gave me truth.”

Hugh Bonneville, who plays Murdoch’s husband in Iris, is equally amorous. He recalls one scene, perhaps the most powerful between them, in which Winslet, as Iris, tells him about her past lovers. “Immediately after the first take, Kate asked that the cameras keep running. And she went through the scene again in a completely different frame of mind,” he says. “Then she did it a third time, again with new emphasis and resonance and truth. It was a lesson in brilliant screen acting.”

Kate Elizabeth Winslet has described herself “instinct on legs,” but her gifts are due, as well, to training and family tradition. She was born in the British town of Reading, forty miles east of London on October 5, 1975, where her father, Roger Winslet, a struggling actor, ran the Reading Repertory. Her mom, Sally, who was schooled as a nanny, acts occasionally, as did Winslet’s grandparents and uncle; her sisters Anna and Beth are both actresses and her little brother Joss is thinking about it.

At the age of eleven, young Kate began attending Redroofs Theatre School in the nearby town of Maidenhead, where she was nicknamed Blubber by her schoolmates. By the time she was 16, the 5’6 ½ beauty was tipping the scales at 185—hardly the body of a budding Juliet or Ophelia. “My mum had a dream of me being a beautiful Alice in Wonderland,” Winslet commented. “I would have more likely have played the back of a bus.”

But she was ambitious and determined. She joined Weight Watchers, discovering her svelte self Just in time to nab her big break: the starring role of a teenage murderess in Heavenly Creatures, a chilling tale of matricide directed by Peter Jackson, who is now an Oscar nominee for The Lord of the Rings. She was just 17.

Heavenly Creatures—and Winslet herself—earned rave reviews, but the movie bombed at the box office. Not so her next major venture, Sense and Sensibility, in 1995. Winslet played Emma Thompson’s highly marriageable sister, Marianne, in this plumy version of Jane Austen’s novel, which Thompson adapted. The teen actress, who dieted down to 119 pounds for the movie, did more that hold her own among such accomplished scene-stealers as Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman; barely 19, she snared her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Suddenly, the Winslet career was in gear. She won leads in the prestigious British costume dramas Jude (based on the Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure) and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (as Ophelia), before actively making a bid to land Titanic. Never the shy violet, Winslet was so desperate to play Rose that she obtained director James Cameron’s phone number, called him repeatedly, and insisted he’d regret it if he didn’t give her the part.

Titanic earned the actress her second Oscar nod, worldwide fame, and the envy of teenage girls everywhere who lapped up media stories about the great, if nonsexual, friendship Winslet shared with Leonardo DiCaprio during the seven months they filmed in Rosarito, Mexico.

However, the movie’s inflated costs and sheer largess invited media scrutiny. Worse, Winslet, who had again added a few pounds prior to filming, drew flack for her zaftig size. At first, she was devastated by the press’s brutal comments. But after much humiliation and soul-searching, she decided instead to accept her with, even to celebrate it, and in doing so became a role model for teenage girls. As she told In Style, the issue of weight is “a complete bore because I am so not fat. I’m fit. I’m healthy. I feel so much more comfortable this way. For god’s sake, don’t argue with nature!”

Yet it’s ironic that almost from the first, Winslet, a woman with body issues, has flaunted her nakedness in movie after movie, from Jude to Hideous Kinky and Holy Smoke, from Quills to Iris, where, as Murdoch, she swims in her birthday suit.

“I’ve always been impulsive,” Winslet has explained. “And I don’t care what people think of me either.” She also insists that she strips for her art. “I never particularly enjoy [doing nude scenes],” she remarked. “But this was something that was very, very, key in John and Iris’ relationship.”

Winslet is eager to do whatever a role requires. Enigma’s Dougray Scott, her co-star, says, “Kate has a lack of fear about playing someone who’s not obviously attractive. Here, she’s quite dowdy. But she brings a great deal of wit and feistiness to the part.

“She takes on whatever she’s going to do with complete energy and preparation,” observes Jan Chapman, the producer of Holy Smoke, who says that for that film, in which Winslet plays a young woman who joins a cult, she actually went to India to visit a guru. “Kate is very versatile. She’s able to do all that preparation and then embody a character to the extent that she actually is the character.”

For all her accomplishments and professional good fortune, however, Winslet’s life has not been without personal pain. Around the time that Titanic premiered, her best friend and former boyfriend, Stephen Tredre, died of cancer. Winslet, shooting Hideous Kinky in Morocco at the time, was devastated; choosing to forego the film’s festivities, she returned briefly to England to attend Tredre’s funeral.

Nevertheless, during Hideous Kinky, the actress managed to fall in love with Jim Threapleton, one of the movie’s assistant directors, who provided comfort in her grief. They married in November of 1998, and their daughter Mia Honey was born on October 12, 200. With typical enthusiasm, Winslet devoted herself to her newborn, working only five weeks during Mia’s first year and declaring proudly, “I am a full-time mom.”

But despite her frequent public statements that the baby had strengthened their relationship, she and Threapleton split up quite suddenly this September. “In a marriage, you can reach a pint where you realize it just isn’t right anymore,” Winslet recently admitted.

Within weeks of ending the relationship, the actress, who has called their split, “surprisingly amicable,” began dating Sam Medes, the director of the Oscar-winning movie American Beauty. She and Mendes had met in July when he asked her to appear in a play he was working on (she passed). Now the pair are virtually inseparable, and the actress maintains that she is deliriously happy.

And busy. Last Christmas she enjoyed a No. 1 single in Britain with her recording of “What If?” from the animated A Christmas Carol—The Movie. She then spent much of this winter in Texas filming The Life of David Gale with Kevin Spacey.

After all, Kate Winslet has proven herself a woman of great appetites—for work, food, family, and living. “I am incredibly passionate about my life,” she has remarked. “I don’t go in for anything halfway. My feelings about things are instant, on the spot. And my heart is always, always on my sleeve.”

No doubt, that’s part of the Winslet charm. And why she’s so brilliant at what she does.

Source: Biography Magazine
Text supplied by Chrissy and Libby (twin Kate fans).