The Unsinkable Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet sits alone at a busy Starbucks in midtown Manhattan: leather jacket, cafe latte, gently unraveling auburn hair. Across the city, her film Titanic is drawing record-breaking crowds. Winslet plays Rose DeWitt Bukater, a Philadelphia society-matron-in-training who dumps her wealthy fiance for Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), the struggling artist who has the mixed fortune of finding true love on a sinking ship. Las Vegas odds make Winslet’s performance, already nominated for a Golden Globe award, a good bet for the Best Actress slot in the more prestigious Academy Awards race. Nationwide, high-school girls are hanging her picture on bedroom walls and asking themselves whether looking like the 22-year-old British actress would allow them their shot at DiCaprio. I’ve just stepped away from the counter to this odd sight. Winslet is often frenetic — or expressive, in the way of actors who don’t necessarily communicate feelings better than normal people but communicate them more. Now she is sitting placidly. As I watch from a distance, she lifts a hand and taps the plate-glass window with the back of a knuckle. In a few weeks, a few days, none of this will be possible for her: to sit, quietly and lumpishly, in public, beside fellow quiet lumps. For better or worse, it is a magic moment, and I return to the table very slowly.
Winslet was famously unhappy on the set of Titanic, directed by the furiously demanding James Cameron. After the film wrapped last April, she gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times that was widely reprinted, that she now says was misinterpreted and that I (maybe because Winslet is so likable and so persuasive, which means she’s a good actress) now also believe was misinterpreted. She said, “I would only work for Jim Cameron again for a lot of money.” She related harrowing near-drownings, and lots and lots of yelling. Cameron — speaking in the generous, immensely relaxed voice of a man who has just learned his film might break a record $400 million at the U.S. box office — holds no grudge, explaining that Winslet was “just letting off steam” after the pressure of shouldering a $200 million production. “Kate would look out and see this small city, with these thousands of people and all this stuff happening,” says Cameron, “and she’d know that what it all boiled down to was what was going on in her eyes.” Winslet’s eyes are excited and blue; they’ve already carried their movie; they don’t have the cramped look of someone expecting to be recognized; they’re off-duty eyes.
Five years ago, after shooting her first film, Winslet went to work slicing ham in a London delicatessen. She is as proud of what she accomplished there — with apron, cutting board and cash register — as she is of any of her film work. “When you’re carving ham off the bone, you need a proper carving fork and knife,” she explains. “I got very good with cheeses as well.” That film was the New Zealand thriller Heavenly Creatures. Onscreen, Winslet combined the strict, stylized features of a queen on a playing card — arched brows, full mouth, flat cheeks — with a startling energy; she would do anything. Since then, Winslet has been on a roll. She co-starred with Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility, a 1995 Jane Austen adaptation, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She starred in Jude, a 1996 Thomas Hardy adaptation, which was epically depressing about weighty themes. Then she played Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour Hamlet. Winslet has had the career that less-serious actors claim they want when they say they want to become serious actors. (She paused to make a Disney film called A Kid in King Arthur’s Court, your basic comedy of anachronism featuring such jokes as: “Now let me see if I have this right — if something is cool, it’s hot, and if something is good, it’s bad?”)
Winslet is a woman of passions. Here is how she got the lead in Titanic: “I closed the script, wept floods of tears and said, ‘Right, I’ve absolutely got to be a part of this. No two ways about it.'” She phoned her agent, and the agent made a couple of calls. Winslet said, “Look, just get me Jim Cameron’s phone number.” She dialed the director’s car phone. “He was on the freeway, and he said, ‘I’m going somewhere.’ And I think he pulled over, and I said, ‘I just have to do this, and you are really mad if you don’t cast me.'” When DiCaprio waffled about signing to play Jack, and both actors were at the Cannes Film Festival, Winslet discovered where DiCaprio was staying, slipped out of a press junket and collared him in his hotel room. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to persuade him to do this, because I’m not doing it without him, and that’s all there is to it,'” she says. “‘I will have him.’ Because he is fucking brilliant. He’s a fucking genius, and that was absolutely why.”
The world probably isn’t big enough for Kate Winslet. Everything she says has special effects in it: Those effects are the words brilliant, absolutely and gorgeous, and because of them, what she says really does seem brilliant, gorgeous and absolute, a slightly better world than the one you live in. She gets impatient with people who can’t keep up with her. “I had a conversation with my little sister, and she went, ‘I’ve got wrinkles ’round my eyes, I’m so depressed.’ And I said, ‘You stupid cow, that’s an exciting thing!'” Winslet is excited by weather (“stunning”) and by messy city road kill: “Oh, hello! Dead squirrel! Splat! How vile!” She makes you feel guilty for not being in a better mood. You get the impression that if you lowered your head to her chest, you’d find her heart racing 120 beats per minute, like a tree shrew’s.
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