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Biography
Kate Elizabeth Winslet was born on
October 5th, 1975, in Reading, Berkshire, to father Roger and mother
Sally Bridges-Winslet. She has two sisters, Anna and Beth, and a brother
named Joss. Acting was in the family. Two of her father's forebears -
twins - appeared in vaudeville.
Her mother's parents, Oliver and Linda,
had run the Reading Repertory Theatre, and her uncle Robert Bridges had
appeared in many productions, most notably as Mr Bumble in the original
West End version of Oliver! Her father, too, was a thespian by trade
(Anna and Beth have also followed this path), performing mostly onstage,
but also appearing on a couple of episodes of Casualty, a show that
provided one of Kate's earliest appearances.
Like most actors, Roger would often have trouble finding work, and
in-between jobs would find employment as a postman, laying tarmac and
with the National Trust. His efforts ensured there were never any real
money problems, extra cash being brought in by Sally, a qualified nanny.
Her profession meant that the Winslet home was often filled with other
people's children. Kate would later say that the atmosphere was, if not
hippy-like, then certainly bohemian, with an ongoing "sense of
holiday".
This atmosphere changed somewhat when,
with Kate just past her 10th birthday, Roger suffered a bad accident
while on the water. Attempting to steer a large canal boat through a
lock in France, his foot was caught in a whipping coil of rope and
nearly severed. It was only the speed of the helicopter ambulance and
the skill of the micro-surgeons that kept it attached.
Kate and the others were told that, after
a year of rehabilitation, her father would be back to normal, playing
with them as usual. The fact that he was not and never would be, she
said later, would cause a lingering feeling of bitterness and betrayal.
This did not prevent Kate from wholeheartedly pursuing her career - and
even at this tender age, she did already consider acting to be her
career, seizing stage parts wherever she could. As a child she'd wept
when she won the part of Mary in the school nativity play "because
it was so important to me". She'd gone on to appear as a scene-stealingly
loud Cornish fairy godmother, a flamboyantly menacing dragon, and as
Lena Marelli in a production of Bugsy Malone (the part Bonnie Langford
played in the movie). She'd appear in other musicals, with her sister
Anna, often not getting home till 11. And there'd even been a TV debut
when she'd advertised Sugar Puffs by dancing alongside the Honey
Monster.
With her heart set on an acting career, the precocious, focused and
absurdly mature Kate was not to be denied. Stage school was what she
wanted so, when her father expressed reservations while on family
holiday on a Norfolk beach, she pinned him to the sand (with her not
inconsiderable bulk) until he let her have her way. So it was that, at
age 11, she auditioned for and was enrolled at Redroofs Theatre School
in Maidenhead.
Here she would appear onstage in a host
of productions, including Peter Pan and Adrian Mole, but she found it a
strange and difficult place. She's described it as "very
competitive, very unreal" and her background made her an outsider,
with many of her classmates hailing from rich families and often popping
off for a few weeks in Barbados. Her weight set her further apart. This
was where she earned the nickname Blubber and found herself mercilessly
teased and occasionally locked in the art-room cupboard.
Kate was only 13 when she began work proper, appearing in episodes of
Shrinks and Casualty. She's said that this and the limitations of a
theatre school caused her miss out on much of her education.
Nevertheless she emerged in 1991 with 8 GCSEs.
Quickly, the TV parts came, her first
major role being in 1991 as the flame-haired renegade Reet in Dark
Season. This was a strange kids' adventure of six episodes, split into
two three-parters. In it, a small gang of youths feel something is amiss
when everyone at their school is given a mega-powerful computer and the
class swot is turned into a mutant.
Discovering that the sinister Mr Eldritch
is plotting to take over the planet by controlling the minds of anyone
using the computers, they battle to foil him in the peskiest way
possible. Then, having out-done him once, a mighty WW2 computer
(co-incidental, that, given Kate would later star in Enigma), named
Behemoth, is dug up in the school grounds and they must fight Eldritch
all over again.
The programme, with its oddly adult subject matter of mind control,
neo-Nazism and pre-millennial angst (it was written by Russell T Davies,
who'd later find fame with Queer As Folk), was well-received and
extremely contemporary. It also introduced Kate to fellow actor Stephen
Tredre, at 27 some 12 years her senior. It says something for Kate's
maturity and forcefulness that the pair would date for the best part of
5 years - and her parents wouldn't complain.
Kate's next outing, Anglo Saxon Attitudes, was another ambitiously
classy project (as most of her projects have been). Indeed, it was only
made after Andrew Davies, who adapted it from Angus Wilson's novel,
began a public argument with ITV over the quality of their programming.
The three-part miniseries saw Gerald Middleton as a renowned historian
who finds his status threatened when an archaeological discovery 30
years previously is discovered to be a hoax. Tara Fitzgerald and Dorothy
Tutin would also feature, Kate appearing in two episodes as a
sculptress's daughter.
Davies's argument would be wholly justified when Anglo Saxon Attitudes
won Best Drama Serial at the BAFTAs. Kate, too, would take something
important from the experience. Noticing that the actress playing her
mother was, to be kind, a little on the large side, she realised that
she had been cast, at least in part, for her size. In short, they had
needed a Blubber. Clearly, as she was keenly searching for lead roles,
this would not do. Engaging the help of her real mother, a Weight
Watchers veteran, she fought the flab and lost three stone inside 12
months.
Meanwhile, she moved on to the comedy series Get Back, created by
Maurice Gran and Laurence Marks, who'd earlier presented grateful TV
licence-payers with Birds Of A Feather. This saw Ray Winstone as a
left-winger and failed boutique owner, forced by circumstance to move
with his family into his dad's shabby Finsbury Park council house.
Now he must struggle back onto his feet,
all the while suffering the jibes of his brother who's successfully
played the burgeoning Eighties money markets and is, naturally, an
arch-conservative. As did the series, every episode would take its title
from a Beatles song. So would Kate, as Eleanor (Rigby), Winstone's
daughter, a girl troubled by the family's fall from grace but still
cheered by her father's tiny victories.
Working in a deli to support herself,
Kate now received the call that would change her life. Indeed, she
claims she was in the middle of making a ham sandwich when called to the
phone. On the line was her agent, calling her "You clever
girl" and informing her that, out of 175 hopefuls, she'd scored one
of the leads in Heavenly Creatures, splatter-director Peter Jackson's
first foray into "serious" cinema (Jackson, of course, would
go on to hit record-breaking paydirt with The Lord Of The Rings). So,
off she went to New Zealand, for this real-life tale of a 1952 murder.
A brilliant combination of bleak reality and sweet fantasy, Heavenly
Creatures told the story of a couple of teens at a Christchurch girls'
college who are drawn together by their shared alienation. Pauline
(Melanie Lynskey) thinks Juliet (Kate) is clever and sophisticated,
Juliet thinks Pauline is tough and real. Together they worship Mario
Lanza and Orson Welles and build their own little world, a world that
grows even more insular when Juliet is confined due to a bout of TB and
the pair share their feelings by letter. Closer and closer they get,
until the adult world, silently fearing the love that dare not speak its
name, fatally attempts to separate them.
The film was a major critical success and saw Jackson nominated for a
Best Original Screenplay Oscar (he'd lose to Quentin Tarantino and Pulp
Fiction). Kate, too, won her fair share of plaudits for an excellent
performance as Juliet Hulme, playing the girl as bright, imaginative and
constantly on the edge of hysteria. Interestingly, the real-life Hulme
(having changed her name to Anne Perry) became a famous writer of murder
mysteries. One of her Inspector Pitt stories was filmed as The Cater St
Hangman, which featured an appearance by Kate's sister, Anna.
There'd be more praise for Kate as she continued her stage career.
Having earlier appeared as Sarah in A Game Of Soldiers, her efforts as
Geraldine in What The Butler Saw saw her nominated as Best Supporting
Actress of 1994 by the Manchester Evening News, her first official
accolade.
Onscreen, Heavenly Creatures began a series of six consecutive period
dramas. Next, she appeared in the comedy fantasy A Kid In King Arthur's
Court where Merlin, attempting to summon a worthy knight to save the
nation from ruin, accidentally plucks a wise-ass child from a Little
League game. Touching down in mediaeval Britain, the kid discovers Joss
Ackland's King Arthur has lost the faith of his people, the Round Table
has been broken up, and an evil Art Malick is trying to take control,
most pointedly by bullying his way into marriage with the fair Princess
Sarah (Kate).
It was enjoyable if flimsy stuff, a
pleasant breather before a run of heavy-duty literary adaptations. The
first of these was Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility, directed by Ang
Lee and scripted by Emma Thompson. Here Gemma Jones's Mrs Dashwood is
widowed and, severely out of pocket, must marry off her three daughters
as quickly as possible, knowing the impecunious girls will struggle to
find suitable suitors.
Though Kate was originally called to
audition for the minor part of Lucy, she ambitiously went for and won
the role of Marianne Dashwood - flighty, excitable and romantic - who
wins the heart of Alan Rickman's staid Colonel Brandon but gets swept up
by Greg Wise's Willoughby, a relentless charmer with a dark secret. Will
her reputation be destroyed by this ineffable cad, or will she find the
true love she seeks?
It was a bright production of high comedy and quality and won a raft of
Oscar nominations, including one for Kate as Best Supporting Actress
(she was out-done by Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite). It was a
tempestuous time in her life, as she'd just split from Stephen Tredre
(she actually stayed for a while with Thompson). She then stepped
forward a century from Sense And Sensibility to star in Jude, Michael
Winterbottom's take on Thomas Hardy's final novel, the mercilessly
depressing Jude The Obscure.
Here Christopher Eccleston played the
titular Jude, a stonemason who dreams of an academic career but is
conned into marriage by a mean-spirited Rachel Griffiths. Breaking away
from this unhappy coupling, he meets and falls for his cousin, Sue
Bridehead (Kate) and they live and breed in sin, shunned by society and
entering a downward spiral leading to one of literature's most horrible
conclusions.
It could have been unbearable to watch, a soul-destroying grind. But
Eccleston's heroic stoicism and, above all, Kate's sassy defiance as
society gradually crushes them made the movie worthwhile. It was painful
and grim, sure, but also enlightening and weirdly enlivening. Mostly
with their faces - and Kate does have the most expressive face - they
told a tale that could not fail to touch the heart and raise the blood
in anger. It was a period drama that could never be accused of being
soppy or slight.
Jude was a fine piece but overshadowed by Kate's other release of 1996,
Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. Two years previously, Kate had auditioned for
the female lead in Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a part won by
Helena Bonham Carter. Branagh remembered her performance and now cast
her - no further readings necessary - as his Ophelia. Having won over
Emma Thompson, she'd now impressed the other half of the recently
separated king and queen of British theatre. It wasn't all plain sailing
though. She was turned down for the role of Abigail in The Crucible -
that was grabbed by Winona
Ryder. And, despite testing for the part, she was already considered
too old to play alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo & Juliet.
Branagh's Hamlet was the first
full-length film version of the play and, at 238 minutes, the second
longest major Hollywood production. And it was another critical triumph
for Kate, who played Ophelia as heartbroken and touchingly vulnerable,
snuffling and suffering as Branagh torments her, eventually driving her
into a padded cell. The movie also saw her line up for the first time
beside Judi Dench and she'd have a fling with one of the other stars,
Rufus Sewell.
It was on the day she filmed the scene where Ophelia finally slips into
madness that she received a call that would be enough to send anyone
crazy - with delight. After months of badgering, pestering and
auditioning, she had won the romantic lead in James Cameron's Titanic,
at that point the most expensive film ever to be made, Gwyneth Paltrow
having turned it down. At last appearing alongside DiCaprio, she was
Rose De Witt Bukater, engaged to the cruel and haughty Billy Zane, but
destined to find an all-too-brief passion with DiCaprio, a street urchin
residing several decks down.
With special effects as vast, impressive and potentially overwhelming as
Titanic's, it was vital that the central love story suffuse the film
with humanity, and Winslet went at it the right way. Allowed by Cameron
to ad-lib, she delivered some of the movie's more poignant moment,
choosing to spit in Zane's face rather than prick him with a hair-pin,
and recalling the place where she and her lover met just as it's about
to sink into the icy depths.
With a second Oscar nomination, Blubber, with her size 10 feet, was the
most sought-after actress in Hollywood. Yet, eschewing the big bucks in
favour of learning experiences, she went her own maverick way. Turning
down the roles taken by Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love and Jodie
Foster in Anna And The King - not wishing to be typecast in period
pieces - she chose instead to seek out smaller, more interesting
productions and signed on for Hideous Kinky.
Based on an autobiographical novel by
Lucien Freud's daughter Emma (a book given to Kate by Stephen Tredre
back when she was 17), the movie was funded by a lottery grant and was
light years away from the blockbusting excess of Titanic. Here she
played an itinerant single mother, trolling around 1972 Morocco, seeking
Sufi enlightenment with two daughters who'd much rather be living a
normal life back in Blighty. It was another fine performance, but the
movie itself failed to move and bombed.
Kate came out of it well, though, having
fallen for 3rd Assistant Director Jim Threapleton (look closely and
you'll see them in a scene together). They'd marry soon afterwards and
bear a daughter, Mia (born October 12th, 2000), but this, sadly, did not
hold them together. They'd divorce in December, 2001, with Threapleton's
"unreasonable behaviour" being cited as the reason.
Kate kept tight-lipped about the
experience, despite the media furore, but many felt Threapleton's
"unreasonable behaviour" was simply an excuse to ease the
divorce through the English courts. The couple had simply drifted apart.
But he freely admitted that he hadn't been happy with life with a film
star, and even said he saw more of Mia after the divorce.
Many were surprised that the now world famous Winslet had chosen Hideous
Kinky as her Titanic follow-up. They'd have been shocked had they known
about the film she shot immediately after that film's completion.
Written and directed by Max Newsom, and called Plunge, this was being
cobbled together for just £30,000 and concerned four Bristol dropouts
who are inspired to improve themselves (and their sex lives) by taking
up surfing. Arriving in autumnal Cornwall, they find no fun nor frolics
- till they spy sweeper-girl Kate dancing on the roofs of some beach
huts.
What happened was this. Winslet was in an emotional turmoil. She'd
fallen for Threapleton, Titanic was exploding and Stephen Tredre, still
a close friend, had died from bone cancer (she actually missed Titanic's
UK premiere to attend his funeral). Needing a break from the craziness
and knowing a friend was appearing in Plunge, she asked if she might pop
down to Cornwall for the day, a day she spent happily making tea and
taking out the bins.
Two days later, she called Newsom to ask
if he might find a part for her - for no money, naturally. Well, what do
you say when an Oscar nominee and Hollywood's newest star asks to be in
your £30,000 production for nothing? She was in. Unfortunately, this
considerably upped the ante for Newsom and his producers, and the movie
would not even be previewed till June, 2002.
Winslet continued to steer clear of Hollywood with Jane Campion's Holy
Smoke. Here she was a young Australian who takes off for India and takes
up with a guru. Her parents, believing her to have been brainwashed,
trick her into returning, then unleash upon her hard-nosed de-programmer
Harvey Keitel. However, despite his best efforts to break her, her
strength and conviction see him overpowered mentally, physically and
sexually. It was an idiosyncratic effort, and not really successful, but
it was easy to see why Campion had chosen Winslet as her latest feminist
heroine. She exuded confidence, pragmatism and charisma.
Her next movie was different again and began another run of period
dramas. In Quills, Geoffrey Rush played the Marquis De Sade, jailed for
his indulgences but still trying to send his ideas out into the world.
Kate played Madeleine Le Clerc, the jolly and buxom laundry maid who
enjoys his attentions, smuggles his writings out of the prison and, at
one point, is soundly whipped (by way of punishment, you understand, not
for pervy thrills).
Having attempted and failed to produce
and star in an adaptation of Therese Raquin (which would have marked her
debut as a femme fatale), she moved on to Enigma, a British WW2 drama
produced by Mick Jagger and Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels. Based
on Robert Harris's novel, this told the story of the team at Bletchley
Park who broke the Nazis' Enigma code after an Enigma machine was
captured by HMS Bulldog (and not a US submarine, as the movie U-571
might have led you to believe). Dougray Scott played a mathematical
genius who's returned from a nervous breakdown to discover that his
lover and colleague Saffron Burrows may have been passing messages to
the Germans and has now disappeared. So, under suspicion himself, he
teams up with Burrows' former room-mate (an appropriately plucky Kate)
and attempts to discover the truth.
Winslet drew much praise for her efforts, particularly as she had
allowed herself to appear dowdy. When interviewed, her looks were always
on the agenda, as they had been since Titanic when her nude scenes with
DiCaprio made her a favourite with women tired of being constantly
force-fed images of stick-thin models. Winslet declared herself happy
with her fuller figure and sympathised with those made to feel
fat.
She had in fact been through it herself.
When doing press for Heavenly Creatures in America, she had convinced
herself that the US industry would only grant her entry if she were
skinny. Consequently, she existed on an apple a day, dropping to 7 stone
10, and only stopping her absurd diet when she began to pass out
regularly. Come 2003, though she was now content to appear glamorous for
the cameras, she still berated GQ Magazine for touching up and
stretching a cover shot that had her looking far thinner than she really
was.
As well as Enigma, 2001 saw her appearing in another British drama,
Iris. Based on the biographical writings of John Bayley, this covered
the life of his long-time partner, the novelist Iris Murdoch. Kate would
play the young Murdoch, a highly intelligent, fiercely spirited college
star on a voyage of sexual and self-discovery. Judi Dench would play the
older Iris, racked by Alzheimer's and fighting for her mind. Both she
and Kate would be Oscar-nominated for performances that somehow made
these very different actresses seem like the same person.
It was only the second time that two
actresses had both been nominated when playing the same character in the
same movie. The first was Titanic - Gloria Stuart and . . . Kate Winslet.
With her divorce coming through in December, 2001, Kate began a
relationship with the famed theatre director Sam Mendes, whose American
Beauty had swept the Oscars for 1999. They'd met when Mendes was casting
for his final season at the Donmar Warehouse, but Kate had decided that
performing Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night for three months in London and
another three in New York was too much. Nothing had started then, but
both of them independently sounded out Richard Eyre, another renowned
theatre director and Kate's director for Iris, as to the other's
character and availability. Soon they would be dating and, after a
secret wedding in the West Indies in May, 2003, she'd give birth to son
Joe Alfie in December that same year.
2003 also saw her first genuine Hollywood
movie in The Life Of David Gale (Titanic having been shot in Mexico),
actually filmed in 2001. Directed by Alan Parker, this saw Kevin Spacey
(who'd earlier won a Best Actor Oscar for his part in Mendes' American
Beauty) as an anti-capital punishment activist who finds himself on
Death Row in Texas for the rape and murder of fellow activist Laura
Linney. Kate would play a Pulitzer Prize-chasing journalist who
interviews him, comes to believe in his innocence and attempts to
investigate the crime, all the while being tailed by sinister forces.
The movie received some violently critical reviews. Though the acting
was praised, the plot was rubbished and it was even claimed that the
film was inadvertently supporting the death penalty. Hardly the idea at
all. Undeterred, Winslet stuck with Hollywood for Eternal Sunshine Of
The Spotless Mind, written by Charlie Kaufman, the mastermind behind
Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. This placed her beside Jim
Carrey, a daunting prospect at the best of times, but worse for Kate
as, with Carrey playing it straight, she was expected to inject the
humour.
Playing the free-spirited and impulsive
Clementine Kruszynski, she finishes a relationship with Carrey and
decides to wipe all memory of him from her mind via Dr Tom Wilkinson's
revolutionary new process. Realising what she's done, Carrey undergoes
the same, but changes his mind halfway through and, in the hope of
rekindling their love, clings desperately to his dissolving memories.
The role would see Winslet Oscar-nominated for the fourth time.
Once again the critics were back onboard, recognising the movie as a
superior fantasy-drama. Kate would now step back into period drama once
more in JM Barrie's Neverland, initially scheduled for release in 2003
but held back to avoid a live action version of Peter Pan. Based on
Allan Knee's play, this was set in 1904 London and followed struggling
playwright Barrie, played by Johnny
Depp, as he became involved with the neighbouring Davies family,
Kate playing Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, an abandoned and dying mother of
four.
Gradually Depp would become a
father-figure to the children and, shocked by the difficulty of their
predicament, would be inspired to create a world where kids are free
from the suffering brought upon them by adults. Cutting between this
increasingly tragic home life and the production of the play it
inspired, the movie would attempt to find serious meaning in the
children's classic.
Winslet would follow this with another
challenge, Romance And Cigarettes, written and directed by John Turturro
and featuring other such mavericks as Steve Buscemi and Christopher
Walken. A kind of cross between The Honeymooners and Pennies From
Heaven, and set in Bensonhurst, New York, this would see James
Gandolfini as a two-timing husband forced to choose between wife
Susan Sarandon and glamorous hussy Kate, neither of whom will tolerate
the ongoing status quo. A musical oddity, the movie would see its stars
lip-synching to tracks by such diverse artists as Irving Berlin, Connie
Francis, Bruce Springsteen and Nick Cave.
Naturally, Kate would bounce immediately back to the classics, joining
the cast of All The King's Men. The novel by Robert Penn Warren had
already adapted into a movie in 1949 and won the Best Picture Oscar, as
well as gongs for Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. Now Sean
Penn took over as Willie Stark, the southern poor boy who rises to
political prominence via all manner of shady dealings, Jude
Law playing his right-hand man, who loses his innocence along the
way.
Winslet would appear as Anne Stanton, the
catalyst for much of the action, whose young love affair with Law sets
his standards of goodness. She's also the daughter of the state governor
and her relationship with Penn leads to disaster.
Staying with the greats, she'd also taken over from a pregnant Cate
Blanchett to play Nora Helmer in Liv Ullmann's long-delayed take on
Ibsen's fraught and painful A Doll's House. It was typical Kate,
stepping from starring roles beside Jim
Carrey, Sean
Penn and Johnny
Depp into a whacked-out musical and then an art-house special. She'd
then lend her voice to the animation Flushed Away, written by Dick
Clement and Ian La Frenais, where an upmarket rat is lost in the sewers
of London.
Winslet has also won a BAFTA (for Sense And Sensibility), and a Grammy,
in 2000, for Best Spoken Word Album For Children. Oh, and she became a
pop star. Having sung the track What If? for an animated version of A
Christmas Carol, she was surprised to see it released as a single at
Christmas, 2001.
It entered the UK Top 10 and was even
more of a hit elsewhere, topping the Irish charts for a month and,
weirdly, also going to Number One in the Flemish charts of Belgium. And
she was honoured by her home town. When Reading council opened a new
complex of flats intended for the homeless, they named it after their
biggest star (yes, even bigger than her husband Mendes) - Winslet Place.
Almost wholly unassuming, and famously unaffected by her success, Kate
Winslet took all these accolades with the tiniest pinch of salt. ~
Dominic Wills
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