| BIOGRAPHY
Kate Winslet was 17 years old when she made her auspicious film
debut as an extroverted but tubercular young girl who constructs
a murderous fantasy world with her best friend in Peter Jackson's
Heavenly Creatures (1994). Since then, her rise to stardom has
been sure and steady, with acclaimed roles in films such as Sense
and Sensibility and Titanic. Possessing a voluptuous, old-fashioned
beauty that lends itself to costume dramas, Winslet has also been
hailed for proudly standing in stark contrast to her more emaciated
colleagues, proving that unconventional beauty and Hollywood success
can indeed go hand in hand.
Born on October 5, 1975, and raised in Reading, England, Winslet
was surrounded by the theater from birth. The daughter of stage
actors and granddaughter of a repertory theater manager, she followed
in the family footsteps at age 11, when she began studying drama.
She made her professional debut on television as a spokeschild
for a popular British cereal and went on to attend a performing-arts
high school. Following graduation in 1991, she launched her stage
career, appearing in adaptations of The Secret Diary of Adrian
Mole and Peter Pan.
After the success of her performance in Heavenly Creatures (a
role for which she beat out 175 other actors), Winslet was cast
as a princess in Disney's A Kid in King Arthur's Court (1995).
That same year, she played the willful, passionate Marianne in
Ang Lee's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. She earned a number
of kudos for her work, including an Oscar nomination for Best
Supporting Actress. She continued to receive good reviews the
following year for her roles in Jude and Kenneth Branagh's adaptation
of Hamlet, but did not rocket to major stardom until she played
the romantic lead opposite Leonardo Di Caprio in James Cameron's
mega-blockbuster Titanic (1997). Nominated for an Oscar for her
performance, Winslet became the youngest actress to garner her
second Oscar nomination.
Following the overwhelming success of Titanic, the actress surprised
many observers with her next project; rather than go for another
high-profile film, she instead chose to star in Gillies MacKinnon's
small independent Hideous Kinky (1998), which cast her as a young
hippie who takes her children to Morocco in order to pursue spiritual
enlightenment. Aside from the good reviews she got for her performance,
she also got a husband out of the film: In 1998, she married James
Threapleton, Hideous Kinky's third assistant director. Though
the marriage wouldn't last long, romance returned to the young
starlet's life when she announced that she was dating American
Beauty director Sam Mendes in late 2001.
In 1999, she played another young woman in search of spiritual
enlightenment, this time in Jane Campion's Holy Smoke. Starring
as an Australian girl who joins a Hindu sect on a visit to India,
Winslet's role required her to do many things, including standing
naked and urinating in front of Harvey Keitel, who played the
man hired by Winslet's parents to cure her of her fixation. Such
difficult requirements didn't prove a problem for the actress,
who had, thus far, built a glorious career on doing the unexpected.
After following up the next year as a laundress who is the Marquis
De Sade's sole link to getting his erotic works to the outside
world in Quills, Winslet was once in the spotlight for her Oscar
nominated performance as a youthful Iris Murdoch in director Richard
Eyre's Iris. In 2003 Winslet could be found in yet another biopic,
this time cast opposite Kevin Spacey in the film The Life of David
Gale. Based on the experience of a University of Texas professor
and avid anti-death-penalty activist who finds himself facing
execution after a false conviction, Winslet portrayed the reporter
who broke the story in a desperate attempt to discover the truth
behind the mysterious and brutal crime for which Gale was convicted. |
FILMOGRAPHY
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• Finding Neverland (2004)
• Pride (2004)
• Romance and Cigarettes (2004)
• The Life of David Gale (2003)
• Enigma (2002)
• Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (2001)
• Quills (2000)
• Hideous Kinky (1999)
• Holy Smoke! (1999)
• Titanic (1997)
• Hamlet (1996)
• Jude (1996)
• A Kid in King Arthur's Court (1995)
• Sense and Sensibility (1995)
• Heavenly Creatures (1994) |
