Monday, December 31, 2007
Kate Winslet
Kate Elizabeth Winslet, born 5 October 1975, is a BAFTA Award-winning English actress. She is noted for having played a wide range of diverse characters over her career. Though her best known role may be that of Rose DeWitt Bukater in the highest-grossing film of all time, Titanic (1997), she was also highly regarded for her first role as Juliet Hulme in Heavenly Creatures (1994).
Although Winslet has not won an Academy Award, she has been highly favoured by the Academy, and holds two records in that area: the youngest person to receive two Oscar nominations, and the most Oscar nominations of any actor before the age of 30 (having received a total of four nominations by that age). In addition, there have been only two occasions where two actors playing the same character in the same film have both been nominated for an Oscar; Winslet was a nominee in both instances (for "Titanic" and "Iris").
On November 22, 1998, Winslet married director Jim Threapleton. The two have a daughter, Mia Honey, who was born on October 12, 2000. After a divorce in 2001, Winslet began a relationship with director Sam Mendes, whom she married on May 24, 2003, on the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean. Their son, Joe Alfie, was born on December 22, 2003.
The media, particularly in England, have enthusiastically documented her weight fluctuations over the years. Winslet has been outspoken about her refusal to lose weight in order to conform to the Hollywood ideal. In February 2003, the British edition of GQ magazine published photographs of Winslet which had been digitally enhanced to make her look dramatically thinner than she really was; Winslet issued a statement saying that the alterations were made without her consent.
She has exceptionally big feet which she claims to have inherited from her mother. (She was bullied and teased about them as a child, as well as for being obese). Her feet are so big in fact (size US 11, although she is only 5'6" 1/2 tall) that she mostly wears heavy-duty men's workboots. She claims she likes wearing them since they make her feel as though her feet are "firmly on the ground".
"Demanded" the role of Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic, insisting to director James Cameron, "I am Rose. I don't even know why you're seeing anyone else!"
Is good friends with actress Emma Thompson and has been since they filmed Sense and Sensibility together. Thompson said that if Winslet slimmed herself down to movie-star shape, Thompson would never speak to her again.
Winslet has earned four Oscar nominations and four Golden Globe nominations, as well as one BAFTA Award and three further BAFTA nominations. Premiere Magazine named her performance as Clementine Kruczynski in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the 81st greatest film performance of all time.
She has also received numerous awards and nominations from other organizations, including the Screen Actors Guild and the Evening Standard British Film Awards.
Winslet won the Los Angeles Film Critics' Association (LAFCA) award for Best Supporting Actress for Iris. For Holy Smoke!, she was Best Actress runner-up at both the New York Film Critics' Circle (NYFCC) and the National Society of Film Critics (NSFC). Winslet was also NYFCC's Best Actress runner-up for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
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