After earning multiple award nominations, one-time Titanic star Kate Winslet has re-established herself as Britain's most powerful movie star. Vanessa Thorpe reports
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Kate Winslet takes her place at the close of 2008 among the elite of Hollywood history. Her stock has never been higher, following her two Golden Globe nominations as best actress in Revolutionary Road and best supporting actress in The Reader.
Glamorous images of her in a sleek Herve Leger dress on the red carpet have served to confirm her position as the most successful British film actress for two or three generations and the most bankable in Hollywood.
"She is probably the most garlanded actress there is," said Mike Goodridge, vice-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and a man with a vote in the Globes, which will be presented on 11 January.
"She has five Oscar nominations and probably another two this time and yet she is only 33. It is pretty good going." Not since Elizabeth Taylor has a British actress had so much clout in the industry. Her position is rivalled only by that of the Australian Cate Blanchett, who makes more films.
With two tough roles in films coming out in the next month, it has been the most intense period of work in Winslet's life. The actress usually paces her work around the directing schedule of her husband, Sam Mendes, and the needs of her two children, Mia and Joe, and had become accustomed to some breathing space. This year has been very different, but it has paid off.
Goodridge, also the United States editor of Screen International, adds that while Winslet has kept a presence on the Hollywood casting wishlist since her success with Titanic in 1997, she has now joined an "absolute A-list".
"Every director wants to work with Kate Winslet. She is thought of as a great actress. But she made a conscious decision to pursue non-Hollywood style movies," he said.
The move away from the mainstream has served Winslet well. While building on the big profile that came with Titanic, she has escaped the restrictions of stardom to make a series of risky choices. Her acclaimed performance as the young Iris Murdoch in Iris in 2001, was followed by an Oscar-nominated role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004.
"She's shaken off the burden of being in Titanic much more successfully than her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio,' said Gavin Smith, editor of the American magazine Film Comment.
"She got out from under the shadow of that right away and has been able to break through and take on roles in which she is convincing as a grown-up person." For Smith, DiCaprio, who is reunited with Winslet as her husband in Revolutionary Road, is still struggling with that process.
Winslet first came to the public's attention in Peter Jackson's disturbing psycho-drama Heavenly Creatures, telling the story of two New Zealand schoolgirls whose passionate relationship drove them to commit murder. Then a touching performance as Marianne Dashwood opposite Emma Thompson in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, bonnetted her up nicely and put her in line for the role as Rose in Titanic. Winslet's choices since then have been inspired,
Goodridge believes. They have given her the creative cutting edge.
"She may not be enough to 'open a movie', something which no actor or actress can really do anymore, but she has great prestige. Only Reese Witherspoon has that power and even then only in a romantic comedy," he said. "Nicole Kidman has fallen away a little with the critical reception for Baz Luhrmann's Australia and, anyway, she is 10 years older than Kate."
Winslet's rival Golden Globe contenders, Angelina Jolie and Anne Hathaway, are perhaps the only actresses alongside her at the top of the A-list of female talent. Her friend Pippa Harris, co-founder with Mendes of Neal Street Productions, believes she has made brilliant and brave choices. "She is very good at choosing a script. She has got this incredibly wise head and is very considered. Her oldest friends say she has always been like that."
Revolutionary Road is the first film she has made with Mendes, best known as the director of American Beauty. The couple, who live in New York and the Cotswolds in west-central England with their son and Winslet's daughter by her first marriage, to director Jim Threapleton, have had to break a family rule to do it. Until this project they have ensured that only one of them worked at a time.
Mendes says that he learned a lot about his wife by directing her: "A surprising amount for somebody I know very, very well. You watch this face that you think you know and an expression pass across it that you've never seen. It's very... exciting," he explains.
For Harris, it's the strength of their marriage that's allowed them to tackle the bleak subject matter of Revolutionary Road, in which Winslet plays a disaffected housewife in 1950s America. "Not many couples would be able to do it, it is pretty explosive stuff,' she said.
The actress has been a contender for the Golden Globes five times, but so far has failed to win. The awards ceremony on 11 January could break the trend. Her nomination for best supporting actress in director Stephen Daldry's The Reader comes in recognition of her portrayal of a former concentration camp guard who has an affair with a teenager.
The nude scenes in the film have caused some consternation in America. Winslet has defended them, saying: "No one gets a kick out of doing them. It's very difficult but as long as there's a justifiable reason for those scenes to be part of the film, then I can make my peace with them."
Influential New York critic Charlie Finch has also raised doubts about the tone of the film. At a private screening hosted by Daldry, Finch accused him of creating a "dishonest and manipulative" vision of Nazi war crimes.
On the question of whether Winslet has reinvented herself with a new fitness regime and new look to match her figure-hugging "body con" dress, her friend Harris is sceptical. "Kate looked fantastic, yes, but she is not at all starry and never will be. She is still the kind of person you would want to go to the pub with."
LOWDOWN
Who: Kate Winslet
Born: 5 October, 1975, England
Key roles: Heavenly Creatures (1994), Titanic (1997), Holy Smoke (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Romance and Cigarettes (2005), The Holiday (2006) Little Children (2007)
Latest: Revolutionary Road opens January 22; The Reader later in 2009
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