Kate Winslet

When you’ve starred in one of the biggest blockbusters of all time, there’s a danger you could spend the rest of your career in the shadow of that success. Not so Kate Winslet, who not only survived Titanic-mania, but consistently succeeded in varied and challenging roles to emerge as one of the most decorated performers of her generation.

Breaking through as a teenager in the cult Peter Jackson drama Heavenly Creatures, Winslet was barely twenty when she received her first Oscar nomination for the role of Marianne Dashwood in Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility. Best Supporting Actress that year went to Mira Sorvino in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite.

More literary work followed, including playing Sue Brideshead opposite Christopher Ecclestone in Jude, and Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s epic take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But it was 1997’s Titanic which truly put her – and just about everybody involved – on the map.

Winslet received her first Leading Actress nomination for her work – plus a lifetime of graciously fielding questions about the capacity of that floating door at the end. Yet while James Cameron’s epic famously won 11 of its 14 Oscar nominations, none of its actors took home trophies. Winslet lost to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, Gloria Stuart lost Best Supporting Actress to Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential, and Leonardo DiCaprio was infamously not nominated at all.

Like DiCaprio, Winslet avoided efforts to replicate the Titanic effect with more tentpole blockbusters, instead focusing on smaller, more challenging projects by auteur directors. None of these projects made much money, but she was rewarded with a third Oscar nomination in 2002 for playing a young version of the writer Iris Murdoch in Iris. For the third time, she lost to an American, this time Best Supporting Actress went to Jennifer Connelly in Beautiful Mind.

In 2004 she had arguably her second career-defining role as Clementine Kruczynski, the vivacious ex-girlfriend of Jim Carrey in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ask many a fan what film Kate Winslet should have won her Oscar for, and the answer will often be this. She did receive a nomination in Best Leading Actress, but the win went to Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby.

By now, a narrative was beginning to form around Winslet – still barely past thirty – being overdue for an Oscar win. Her fifth nomination came in 2007, again in the Leading Actress category, but the low-budget melodrama Little Children, which included themes of pedophilia, was probably too challenging to allow her to mount much of a challenge to fellow Brit Helen Mirren, who won that year for The Queen.

In 2009, Winslet’s moment finally arrived. She had two movies in contention that year – a reunion with Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road – directed by her then-husband Sam Mendes – and her role as former Nazi collaborator Hanna Schmidt in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader. At the time there was speculation of a double nomination, with her Revolutionary Road performance in Lead and The Reader in supporting.

Ultimately though, she was nominated in Leading Actress for the latter performance and Revolutionary Road fell by the wayside. Any disappointment was short-lived though, as Winslet triumphed at last, giving a predictably joyous and memorable acceptance speech.

Following her Oscar victory, Winslet continued to take on interesting and diverse projects in film and television. In the latter medium she picked up Emmy awards for Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown, while notable film roles included Roman Polanski’s Carnage, Jason Reitman’s Labor Day and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s camp classic Australian melodrama The Dressmaker.

Her seventh and to date most recent Oscar nomination came in 2015 when she played Joanna Hoffman in Danny Boyle’s biopic of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. That one went to Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl. 

In 2025, Winslet is in contention for a nomination in Lee, her self-produced biopic of the World War II era journalist Lee Miller.