Worth the wait in gold
Kate Winslet held in the tears but not the earthy remembrance of standing in front of the mirror as an 8-year-old kid, pretending her shampoo bottle was an Oscar. Accepting the lead actress trophy for her performance as a former German concentration camp guard in “The Reader,” she noted gaily, “Well, it’s not a shampoo bottle now!”
To her fellow nominees, she said, “I think we can’t all believe we’re in the same category as Meryl Streep at all.” To a slightly chagrined Streep, she added merrily, “I’m sorry, Meryl, you just have to suck that up.”
Twenty-five years from now, when Winslet is about Streep’s age, it is likely that the 33-year-old Reading, England, native will have ascended into the older actress’ hallowed circle as perhaps the greatest actress of her generation. First nominated for an Oscar at age 21, Winslet went winless until this year with her sixth Oscar nod.
Winslet’s composure on Sunday night was a far cry from her teary Golden Globe acceptance speeches, which made her stiff-upper-lip countrymen cringe, and from her early performances in Hollywood.
Even earlier on the Oscar red carpet, she was less composed. She was literally trembling. “I was fine until two hours ago. Now I’m scared. I started getting very nervous . . . right now I’m just trying to calm down.”
The actress burst onto the scene with Peter Jackson’s creepy 1994 film “Heavenly Creatures,” playing an Aussie schoolgirl in an obsessive, ultimately murderous relationship with a female school chum.
“She scared the hell out of me,” recalls the Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein, who released that early film and also distributed “The Reader.”
In those early days, Winslet managed to be somehow modern and independent-minded, even when wearing a corset. Her characters, like her Marianne in “Sense and Sensibility” or Ophelia in “Hamlet,” seem tinged with madness or at least with emotions so big they threatened to topple them.
Her early penchant for costume dramas had initially dissuaded James Cameron from even considering her for the part of Rose in his epic “Titanic,” a prejudice he reconsidered after seeing almost every actress in the 18-to-21 age range. “She was already known as ‘Corset Kate,’ ” recalls the director, who admits, “When I met her, all that intellectualizing went out the window.”
He notes that even then, “she really understood, maybe too well, that she was carrying the weight of the production on her shoulders. Her approach to acting is just to be incredibly focused and incredibly disciplined all the time. It could not be a greater contrast to Leonardo [DiCaprio] who was playing video games up to the time I said, ‘action,’ and then went from 1996 to 1912 in a blink.”
DiCaprio remembers that “very early on, we created a trust level with each other. We forged an alliance on that set that we were going to look out for each other. We were 21 years old in Mexico, on a ship on hydraulics, which at a moment’s notice could be filled with seawater. We said, we’re going to look out for each other.” (The pair remain close friends, which is how DiCaprio ended up opposite Winslet’s Golden Globe-winning performance in “Revolutionary Road.”)
Winslet went forth from the box office-smashing, multiple-Oscar-winning “Titanic” not by refashioning herself as a mega-movie star but by delving into the most complicated parts she could find -- playing women who refuse to be simplified, spiky, fiercely intelligent, funny, sensuous, searching, and usually completely different from one another.
“She’s a transformative actress,” says her “Reader” director, Stephen Daldry. “That’s what Kate is. She’s a proper actress. She doesn’t do a version of herself.”
Almost everyone who has worked with Winslet praises her braininess and ferocious dedication.
“The way she works,” sighs her husband, Sam Mendes, who directed her in “Revolutionary Road” but never ate lunch with her during filming because she preferred to retreat to her trailer to work. “She is incredibly, relentlessly dedicated and detail oriented to the point of obsession. But then when she has achieved what she wanted to achieve in the scene, like three takes in, she would say, ‘OK, I’ve done it. Now what do you want me to do?’ She will try anything. So she is simultaneously incredibly focused and incredibly free.”
“There are no games or vanity or wardrobe freak-outs,” adds Todd Field, who directed Winslet in her Oscar-nominated performance in “Little Children,” in which she plays a suburban mother in an overwhelming adulterous affair with the local stay-at-home dad. “With Kate, you have a true collaborator. She is unusual in that, though she is an actor who prepares with the fastidiousness of a brain surgeon, she will instantly abandon all of it, with no regret whatsoever, the moment she’s been asked to steer somewhere else. Her tendency is always to toss the highway map in favor of the unpaved road.”
One can imagine how Winslet, a mother of two, might find some kernel of herself who can relate to both the mother in “Little Children” or the suicidal disappointed idealist mother of “Revolutionary Road,” or even the nutty red-haired free spirit in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but as Daldry points out, there was no point of relatability between Winslet, and the former concentration camp guard she plays in “The Reader.”
“There is nothing in the character of Hanna Schmitz that Kate could draw on from her own experience,” Daldry says. Complicating Winslet’s task is the fact that her Hanna’s true emotions are not expressed but rather deduced by the film’s other characters and the audience. “She’s perceived from other people’s point of views. You have to join the dots,” Daldry says. “Kate has the ability to join the dots.”
So how does one prepare for playing a sensuous illiterate, an authority fearing standard-bearer capable of letting 300 people burn to death but also acts of individual compassion?
Apparently, by locking yourself into a specially rented room for two months, to think, reflect, research eight hours a day. “She never stops questioning. Never stops challenging. She never rests,” Daldry says.
And she’s willing to go with the moment when necessary.
Cameron remembers how he finally caught the famed love scene on the bow of the “Titanic.” For nine days, the filmmakers waited for the perfect sunset, and finally on the 10th day a cloudy sky brought brief intimations of a brilliant fiery glow. Cameron and the camera crew ran to the bow of the ship. “They’re pinning Kate’s wig on. She’s running in her corset and gown,” recalls Cameron. “There was no rehearsal. We slapped on one light. Kate suddenly saw the sun burst forth from underneath the clouds on the horizon. She yelled down at me, “Shoot!!!”
They did one take, which became the most famous scene in the movie.
And Cameron remembers with a laugh, “I had never heard an actress turn to me and yell ‘shoot’ before.”
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Through the years
So, have you seen “The Reader” yet? Well, don’t rush into anything. You might want to work up to it slowly with these Kate Winslet films.
“Heavenly Creatures” (1994): A true story of two schoolgirls’ fantasy life that pushes them into an obsessive, ultimately murderous, relationship.
“Sense and Sensibility” (1995): Based on Jane Austen, this Emma Thompson-scripted, Ang Lee-directed film features Winslet as the romantic Marianne Dashwood walking through the rain to see the estate of the perfidious Willoughby.
“Titanic” (1997): In case you’re one of the people who’s missed the biggest box-office hit of all time, watch Kate wield an ax and seduce a young Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004): A Charlie Kaufman-Michel Gondry surreal romance featuring Winslet as the free-spirited Clementine, a doleful Jim Carrey as her beloved, and the cursed Lacuna, a company that promises to wipe minds entirely clean.
“Little Children” (2006): No one but Winslet, with her sweaty overeagerness, could portray the unbearable agony of a former campus feminist now locked into suburbia, motherhood and an adulterous affair.
“Revolutionary Road” (2008): Kate and Leo reteam as idealistic and disappointed lovers, now encased in failed expectations and the Connecticut suburbs.