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Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet

Net Worth

$65,000,000

Born in (City)

Reading, England

Born in (Country)

United Kingdom

Date of Birth

05th December, 1975

Date of Death

-

Mother

Sally Anne Winslet

Father

Roger John Winslet

Children

  • Mia (2000)
  • Joe (2003)
  • Bear (2013)

About

Kate Elizabeth Winslet, is an English actress known for her performance of sharply drawn portrayals of spirited and unusual women are edgy, disturbed, and in search of larger things in life. A charming personality with a down-to-earth attitude Winslet is unlike other English actors. Mother of three Kate is presently married to Edward Abel Smith. Her first screen performance was in the television series Dark Season (1991) at the age of 15. In her debut film, Heavenly Creature (1994), she played the role of a teenage murderess. Global stardom and acclaim came with her performance in Titanic (1998) as Rose. She gained further reception from her performances in Finding Neverland, Little Children, and, of course, The Reader. Winslet in her career has rarely done any commercial movie. As an actor and an artist, she allows herself to be challenged by avoiding typecasting and taking up roles that are troubled, thorny, discontented, and most of all difficult. Apart from her acting skills, Kate is also known for her philanthropic endeavors. Growing up in poverty the actor knows the hardships of being underprivileged. Winslet through her diverse and extensive intentional philanthropic work attempts to make the world a better place. The list of her humanitarian endeavors is never-ending but to name a few she is the co-founder of the charity Golden Hat Foundation(2010) which is named after a poem by Keli Thorsteinsson and aims to create awareness about Autism. Winslet has also written a book on the topic, The Golden Hat: Talking Back to Autism (2012). She has also received Spain’s Y Dona award for Best Humanitarian Work and is a patron of The Family Haven which is a charity that provides counseling services to vulnerable families. Among many other ventures, she was also part of the 2007 auction to raise funds for Afghanistan Relief Organisation. In 2015 lent support to World’s Largest Lesson campaign by UNICEF which aims at creating awareness among children about sustainable development and global citizenship. 2017 also saw the pair of Winslet and DiCaprio are doing a fundraiser for his environmental foundation on global warming. The actor also has a soft heart for animals. She has also worked in collaboration with PETA to raise awareness about the force-feeding of birds. She is the brand ambassador of luxury brands such as Lancôme (cosmetics and skincare) and Longines (watches). Even the brands that she has endorsed believe and work for humanitarian causes. For instance, in 2018 Winslet teamed with Lancôme and National Literacy Trust launched a program to educate underprivileged children in the UK. Her proclivity for idiosyncratic roles, her unpretentious demeanor, and her on-screen portrayals of edgy unusual women make Winslet stand out among the stars. She continues to motivate many women with her unabashed sanguine nature

Early Life

Kate is of British descent and also has Irish ancestry on her father's side and Swedish ancestry on her mother's side. Her mother worked as a nanny and waitress, and her father, a struggling actor, took laboring jobs to support the family. Her maternal grandparents were both actors and ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company. Winslet has two sisters, Anna and Beth, both of whom are actresses, and a younger brother, Joss. The family had limited financial means; they lived on free meal benefits and were supported by a charity named the Actor's Charitable Trust. When Winslet was ten, her father severely injured his foot in a boating accident and found it harder to work, leading to more financial hardships for the family. Winslet has said her parents always made them feel cared for and that they were a supportive family. She was educated in The Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead, later attended St Mary and All Saints' Church of England primary schooling. Living in a family surrounded by actors inspired her to pursue acting from a young age. She and her sisters participated in amateur stage shows at school and at a local youth theatre, named Foundations. When she was five, Winslet made her first stage appearance as Mary in her school's production of the Nativity. She has described herself as an overweight child; she was nicknamed "blubber" by her schoolmates and was bullied for the way she looked. At 11, Winslet was accepted into the Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead. The school also functioned as an agency and took students to London to audition for acting jobs. She appeared in a Sugar Puffs commercial and was dubbed for foreign films. She also took part in productions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and played the lead role of Wendy Darling in Peter Pan. She played key roles as Miss Agatha Hannigan in Annie, the Mother Wolf in The Jungle Book, and Lena Marelli in Bugsy Malone. In 1991, within two weeks of finishing her GCSE examinations, Winslet made her screen debut as one of the main cast members of the BBC science fiction television series Dark Season. Her part was that of Reet, a schoolgirl who helps her classmates fight against a sinister man distributing free computers to her school. She did not earn much, to support herself, she worked at a delicatessen. In 1992, she had a small part in the television film Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, an adaptation of Angus Wilson's satirical novel. She next took on the role of the young daughter of a bankrupt self-made man (played by Ray Winstone) in the television sitcom Get Back (1992–93). She also had a guest role in a 1993 episode of the medical drama series Casualty.

Road to Success

Her first major role was played in director Peter Jackson’s drama Heavenly Creatures (1994). In 1995 Winslet appeared in an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility; the film was written by actress Emma Thompson and directed by Ang Lee. This film brought her to the attention of a larger audience and earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Winslet then starred in another literary adaptation, Jude (1996), which was based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure (1895). Winslet solidified her burgeoning reputation for taking period roles by portraying Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s production of Hamlet (1996). In 1997 Winslet went on becoming an international star with the release of director James Cameron’s Titanic, an epic that innovatively blended a conventional romantic storyline with the large-scale computer-generated special effects normally reserved for action movies. Winslet portrayed heroine Rose DeWitt Bukater, a wealthy, idealistic young woman who pursues a brief, passionate affair with Jack Dawson, a struggling artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film set box-office records, and Winslet received her second Oscar nomination. Following the phenomenon generated by Titanic, Winslet eschewed a career in popular, lucrative movies in favor of several independent films. She was featured in Hideous Kinky (1998), Holy Smoke (1999), further demonstrated a tendency to choose provocative roles with Quills (2000), in which she played a laundress smuggling manuscripts. Her transformation into writer Iris Murdoch in Iris (2001) won her further accolades, including Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Again demonstrating a proclivity for idiosyncratic choices, Winslet portrayed a woman who has the memories of a painful relationship erased by a new medical procedure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), earning her yet another Academy Award nomination. In Little Children (2006) she appeared as a housewife whose frustration with the tedium of her suburban existence results in an adulterous affair. Winslet earned her fifth Academy Award nomination for that performance; she turned to lighter matters with the romantic comedy The Holiday (2006) and Flushed Away (2006), a computer-animated adventure for which she provided the voice of a rat. A 2008 adaptation of Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road again paired Winslet and DiCaprio, this time as an unconventional couple attempting to buck the restrictive mores of 1950s suburbia. In The Reader (2008), Winslet explored the ethical complexities of the Holocaust as an illiterate concentration camp guard. For her performances in Revolutionary Road and The Reader, Winslet won Golden Globe Awards for best actress and best-supporting actress, respectively. For her work in The Reader, she also earned her first Academy Award (for best actress). In 2011 Winslet moved to the small screen with the titular role in the Home Box Office (HBO) miniseries Mildred Pierce, based on James M. Cain’s novel. Returning to feature films, she then appeared in Contagion (2011), the satiric comedy Carnage (2011), she played a single mother in Labor Day (2013). Winslet then stalked the screen as a ruthless operative in Divergent (2014), A Little Chaos (2014). In 2016 Winslet was awarded a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Apple marketing executive Joanna Hoffman in Steve Jobs (2015), a biopic about seminal moments in the career of the titular computer pioneer; she also received an Oscar nomination, her seventh overall, for her performance. Winslet then appeared as a vampy Russian mobster in the crime thriller Triple 9 and as the coworker of a grieving father in the tearjerker Collateral Beauty (both 2016). Her credits from 2017 included The Mountain Between Us, Wonder Wheel, Ammonite (2020).

Challenges

The main challenge she faced was while growing up, she was overweighted, nicknamed as 'blubber' by her classmates. The weight-related matter delayed her career start. At school she was working simultaneously with the Starmaker Theatre Company in Reading, she participated in over twenty of their stage productions, but was rarely selected as the lead due to her weight. In 1992, she had a small part in the television film Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, an adaptation of Angus Wilson's satirical novel. Winslet, who weighed 13 stone 3 pounds (84 kg; 185 lb) at the time, played the daughter of an obese woman in it. While filming, an off-hand comment from the director Diarmuid Lawrence about the likeness between her and the actress who played her mother prompted Winslet to lose weight. In May 2007, Winslet donated a £3,000 settlement that she received for a libel action against a UK magazine to 3 eating disorder charities, including beat. The magazine falsely claimed that she visited a diet doctor. Winslet also takes a firm stand against body shaming and bullying and has also spoken against botox and plastic surgery. “As a child, I never heard one woman say to me, “I love my body”. Not my mother, my elder sister, my best friend. No one woman has ever said, “I am so proud of my body”, says the actor. In an interview, she talked about being locked up in a cupboard by her classmates and also being rejected by agents because of her weight but she never gave up. In 2017 at the WE day charity event in her motivating speech, Winslet went on to say that to rising she had to be indestructible, ignore all the negative comments, and believe in herself. There is no denying that the actor is strong-headed with an independent mind.

Failures

The failures she encountered was during her early age, she was overweighted, in the early days, she was subjected to objectification. She played a role that was mediocre and did not bring any recognition. Although, she is not open about her personal life the other thing she considers as failure other than the start of her career, is her marriages. The lessons one can learn from the renowned actor are to be yourself, always look at the strengths of people especially your partner, and do not regret second chances in life.

Achievements

She won a ‘Grammy Award’ for ‘Best Spoken Word Album for Children’ for ‘Listen to the Storyteller’ in 1999.|In 2001, she won the ‘Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award’ for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for her performance in ‘Iris.’|She won an ‘Academy Award’ for ‘Best Actress’ for ‘The Reader’ in 2008.|She won two ‘Golden Globe Awards’ under the ‘Best Actress (Drama)’ and ‘Best Supporting Actress’ categories for ‘Revolutionary Road’ in 2008.|In 2011, she won a ‘Primetime Emmy Award’ for ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie’ for the television show ‘Mildred Pierce.’|In 2011, she received the ‘Yo Dona Award’ for ‘Best Humanitarian Work.’|She was made a ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire’ in 2012 for her contributions to drama.

Quotes

  • The good and bad things are what form us as people... change makes us grow.
  • Life is short, and it is here to be lived.