It’s amazing, and terrifying, to think that Kate Winslet turned 40-years-old yesterday, and has now been a movie star for 21 years. That’s one entire Ansel Elgort ago. Breaking out with a stunning performance in “Heavenly Creatures” while still just 18 (though she had credits in British TV stretching back into her earlier teens), Winslet has barely looked back since.
She followed her breakouts with high-profile Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Shakespeare adaptations, before starring in “Titanic,” which went on to become one of the biggest movies of all time. Rather than capitalizing on her A-list status with more blockbusters, Winslet chose to make the movies she wanted to make with directors she wanted to make them with, picking out projects with the likes of Jane Campion, Philip Kaufman, Richard Eyre, and Alan Parker, before upending her period-movie image with another brilliant turn in “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.”
Winslet finally won an Oscar for “The Reader” in 2008 after six nominations, but has remained one of our most wide-ranging and risk-taking actors — not everything has paid off (“Labor Day,” “Movie 43,” “Divergent”), but when it does, as it did with her HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce,” it pays off in spades. Along with her 40th birthday this week, and the arrival of a trailer for her next picture, “Triple 9,” Winslet’s back in theaters with an Oscar-tipped supporting turn in Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs.” To mark the occasion, we’ve picked out her ten most essential performances. Here’s hoping there’s plenty more to come in the next 21 years, and beyond. Check out our picks below.
“Heavenly Creatures” (1994)
Rushing towards the camera, covered in blood, and screaming murder in a fit of total insanity. This is how Kate Winslet made her glorious screen entrance in Peter Jackson‘s “Heavenly Creatures.” Made all the more memorable for being so completely disengaged from practically anything she’d go on to do in her accomplished career. For the film, Jackson chose a deranged real-life story from his local New Zealand, where a couple of schoolgirls grew obsessively close to one another to the point of executing murder. In a city called — note the irony — Christchurch, Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) gets along swimmingly with the new girl from England, Juliet Hulme (Winslet). They share an equal idolatry for American tenor Mario Lanza and British actor James Mason, and begin writing a fantasy novel together. It’s a warped, debauched, satire of England’s royal family, which they re-enact with creepy-looking sculpted figurines. The whole affair ends in a hair-raisingly horrific climax, but the build-up, through Jackson’s dark fantasy and violent imagination — not to mention the film’s Oscar-nominated screenplay — makes “Heavenly Creatures” a consummate joy to experience. Made all the more delicious thanks to the total revelation of the girls’ performances. Winslet, 19-years-old at the time of the film’s release, bites into the demented, posh, arrogant, and prim Juliet with a kind of hunger that all stars-in-the-making demonstrate. A scene has her screaming at her mother (Diana Kent) about how the two BFFs are going to Hollywood and becoming film stars. It’s totally hysterical, but uncannily prescient in Winslet’s case; for there was no other way than up after such a ferociously fun film debut.
“Sense And Sensibility” (1995)
Ang Lee famously had concerns over Kate Winslet and how she would approach the fragile delicacy of a Jane Austen character. Of course, after seeing her savage screen debut in “Heavenly Creatures,” who can blame him? The story goes that she had to practice t’ai chi, read lots of Victorian novels, take etiquette lessons, and work with a piano teacher in order to capture the elegance of young Marianne Dashwood. The result is as eye-opening as her official introduction, except in the polar opposite direction. Elegance, grace, and a romantic sense of desperation as a conduit for life’s experiences suited Winslet to such a tee that she became slightly pigeon-holed into this type of role from there on out. In “Sense & Sensibility,” an Austen adaptation by the magnanimous Emma Thompson (who also plays Marianne’s older sister, Elinor), the Dashwood sisters are left suddenly destitute when their father (Tom Wilkinson) passes on. A slew of suitors vie for the daughters’ hands in marriage, allowing Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant to round out the eminent cast. Among these veterans of the trade, Winslet shines like a pearl, where the collective first-impressions of her exquisite talents on display are perfectly summed up in that moment Rickman’s colonel hears her singing and falls instantly in love. Unsurprisingly, the role was the first of six Academy Award nominations for the then 20-year-old Winslet. Of all the period novel adaptations to come, through all her romantic roles, none really take away from the permanent impression she makes in this one.
“Titanic” (1997)
“Heavenly Creatures” and “Sense & Sensibility” might have marked Winslet as one to watch (along with further period pictures “Hamlet” and “Jude”), but it was “Titanic” that landed her firmly on the A-list, given that it was, you know, the biggest-grossing movie in history up to that point. It would be so easy for an actress, especially one who was then just 22, to be overwhelmed or overshadowed in a movie of the enormous scale and success of “Titanic,” but from the moment she boards the vessel, she confirms that she wasn’t just a promising young actress, but also a giant movie star. Cast after the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Claire Danes, and Gabrielle Anwar (Google her, millennials) were considered, Winslet plays Rose, a once-wealthy 17-year-old engaged to the horrible Billy Zane in order to rescue her family’s fortunes, who, once at sea, falls head over heels for the roguishly charming Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio, obviously). Winslet does all the giant blockbuster leading-lady stuff right: she screams, she swims, she has palpable chemistry with her co-star, and pulls off a faultless American accent, and her beauty, a little more pre-Raphaelite than many of her contemporaries, makes her stand out even further. But it’s the subtlety she brings to a broadly-written role — the sense of a young girl both more street-smart than you’d think, and more naive than she hopes; one both stuck in and thrown out of her privilege — that makes the performance sing. The film made nearly two billion dollars, and unlike DiCaprio, Winslet was Oscar-nominated for the movie, her first nomination as lead.
“Holy Smoke” (1999)
Jane Campion‘s somewhat discombobulated and messy “Holy Smoke” is an Aussie tale full of mixed emotions and pent-up gender politics, suffering from an overtly cheeky screenplay (written by Anne Campion, Jane’s sister) and jarring jokes with dull punchlines (like that WTF montage of ex-boyfriends). The biggest reason for its lasting powers can be summed up in two words, one name: Kate Winslet. Yep, even the striking cinematography of the Australian outback by Dion Beebe (“Memoirs of a Geisha“) and Harvey Keitel’s solid co-lead performance seem to be generated and influenced by Winslet’s radiant range. She plays Ruth Barron, a young woman who surprises her mild-mannered and simple-life parents when she joins a Hindu cult under the auspices of a guru called Baba. Famed American deprogrammer P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel) is commissioned to spend three days with Ruth in order to help her come back to her senses. Instead, by stroking, manipulating, and dismantling his male ego, Ruth turns the tables on P.J. Though the script and Campion’s wayward direction are often uneven, Winslet keeps us anchored and wholly invested thanks to her fascinatingly complex, by turns hilarious and enigmatic, multi-dimensional turn. Fragile victim, whip-smart victor, a daughter both doting and defiant — depending on which parent she’s talking to — Ruth uses everything in her feminine arsenal (such as blinding the male gaze with abstract sexiness) to take and keep control. It’s a trait the actress masters to a piercing degree. Indeed, long before she puts lipstick and a red dress on Harvey frickin’ Keitel, one gets the sense that everything in “Holy Smoke” wraps around Winslet’s little finger.