It was October 5, 1975, when a little girl was born in Reading, U.K., to a working-class family of artists. Her father, Roger Winslet, and her sisters Beth Winslet and Anna Winslet were actors.
In an interview for The New York Times in 2009, she shared that she always knew that acting was her destiny, but she never dreamt about the red carpet, awards, money or fame. She just wanted to act. No one, not even she, knew at that time that the shy and self-insecure Kate Winslet, was about to become one of Hollywood’s biggest young stars.
Before becoming our beloved Rose
Kate didn’t feel pretty when she was a child. She used to be called “chubby,” and as Entertainment Weekly wrote, an early drama teacher told her that, as an actress, she could only aspire for “fat girl parts.”
“Being told something like that, at such a young age, when your brain is developing, I’m sure that impacts you later in your life,” said Natallie Shakeri, progressive degree student at USC.
Winslet was only 14 at the time, but an insecurity in her physical appearance accompanied her throughout her childhood.
Because, even with all her insecurities, she always loved acting. “I would always feel quite smug about the fact that I had this one thing that I really loved, and I didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything to be able to do it,” shared Winslet in the same interview with The New York Times. “I knew that nobody else had any understanding of how great that feeling – acting – was.”
Guided by this inner passion, she started auditioning and pursuing an acting career from the age of 12, with not much success until she got cast for her first movie, “Heavenly Creatures” (1994), at 17 years old. Directed by Peter Jackson, this was Winslet’s first major role in her successful career that was just starting.
As she shared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2017, when she received the call that gave her the news that she got the part as Juliet Hulme in Jackson’s movie, she was working at a restaurant and making a turkey sandwich.
After her great debut, she starred in movies like “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), “Jude” (1996) and “Hamlet” (1996). She received an Academy Award Nomination in 1995 for Best Supporting Actress in “Sense and Sensibility.”
“Titanic”: The tip of the iceberg of her career
It was 1997 when the opportunity of Winslet life arrived. As the Independent wrote, obsessed with the story of the real Titanic ship, James Cameron decided to create a movie exploring not only the tragedy behind its sinking, but also adding a drama element surrounding an impossible romance between two young people of opposite social classes. Among many options, Cameron saw something special in Kate Winslet that made him decide on her as the movie’s main character.
Winslet got the part of Rose DeWitt Bukater, the American socialite, Titanic sinking survivor and Jack Dawson’s (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) first impossible but true love. Despite Dawson and Bukater’s tragic ending, “Titanic” not only gave Winslet and DiCaprio the biggest professional opportunity of their acting careers, but also, as People wrote, a long-lasting friendship that continued over the years.
To this day, “Titanic” remains one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. It reached $28,638,131 at the box office at its domestic opening, and went on to receive 16 Academy Awards nominations in 1998 and won 11 of them, including Best Director and Best Picture.
Isabella Lyons, a graduate student at the Annenberg School, remembers watching Titanic when she was a kid and feeling impressed by it.
“I was a gymnast when I first watched it, and I had my floor routine with the song ‘My Heart Will Go On, ’the movie’s main theme. I also think it has prompted young kids to educate themselves on the story of the real Titanic ship,” Lyons said.
But this amount of success was not easy to handle for 22-year-old Kate. She has stated in The New York Times not having been prepared for fame at all.
“‘Titanic’ was huge and overwhelming. My life was completely upside down. I didn’t know who I was. I was not remotely equipped to be a famous person. I didn’t know what to do or how to cope at all,” Winslet said for The New York Times in 2009. After her great break, she decided to stay back from the big screen for some years.
Throughout a more than 30-year-long career, Winslet has given audiences memorable characters and stories, including the messy and impulsive Clementine Kruczynski in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), the column editor Iris Simpkins in “The Holiday” (2006), and the police detective Mare Sheehan in the miniseries “Mare of Easttown” (2021).
For Winslet, no fame, recognition or financial success made her forget where she came from.
“I really would work for nothing, and I don’t particularly want to be famous. The sort of financial side of it to me is an absolute bonus, and it means that I can take care of people that I love,” shared a mature 22-year-old Winslet in an interview for The Insider, in 1997.
Her fight for respectful media coverage of women
At the height of her career, Winslet suffered body shaming and verbal attacks from the press as a young woman.
In an interview for “60 Minutes” in 2024, she remembered being verbally attacked by a reporter at the 1998 Golden Globe Awards, who stated that the dress she was wearing needed to be bigger to fit her.
“If I could turn back the clock, I would have used my voice in a completely different way. I would have said to journalists: ‘Don’t you dare treat me like this. I’m a young woman, my body is changing, I’m figuring it out. Don’t make this any harder than it already is,’ she admitted in an interview in 2022.
At the age of 51, Winslet is married to Edward Abel Smith, better known as Ned Rocknroll, has three kids – her daughter, Mia Threapleton, is also an actress – and has expanded her career into directing. As her passion for acting remains as alive as ever, so does her advocacy for body positivity and women’s fair media.
Edited by Camille Culbertson, Andriana Yatsyshyn and Sammie Yen.