Kate Winslet

Kate Elizabeth Winslet (born 5 October 1975) is an English actress. She is known for her work in independent films, particularly period dramas. Winslet is the recipient of various accolades, including three British Academy Film Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and is among the few performers to have won Academy, Emmy, and Grammy Awards.

Born in Reading, Berkshire, Winslet studied drama at the Redroofs Theatre School. Her first screen appearance, at age 15, was in the British television series Dark Season (1991). She made her film debut playing a teenage murderess in Heavenly Creatures (1994), and received her first nominations for the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award, and won BAFTA Award and Screen Actors Guild Award for playing Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1995). At only 20 years old of age, she became one of the youngest recipients of the awards. Global stardom followed soon after with her leading role in the epic romance Titanic (1997), which earned her second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and, at age 22, made her the fourth-youngest nominee in the category at that time. Titanic was the highest-grossing film of all time to that point, after which she eschewed parts in blockbusters in favor of critically acclaimed period pieces, including Quills (2000) and Iris (2001), which were not widely seen.

The science fiction romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), in which Winslet was cast against type in a contemporary setting, proved to be a turning point in her career, and she gained further recognition for her performances in Finding Neverland (2004), Little Children (2006), Revolutionary Road (2008), and The Reader (2008). For the character she played in the last of these, she won the BAFTA Award and Academy Award for Best Actress. In the 2010s, Winslet played a single mother in 1930s America in the miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), joined the Divergent film series, and portrayed Joanna Hoffman in Steve Jobs (2015). She won a Primetime Emmy Award for the first of these and a third BAFTA Award for the lattermost.

For her narration of a short story in the audiobook Listen to the Storyteller (1999), Winslet won a Grammy Award. She performed the song "What If" for the soundtrack of her film Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001). In 2019, Winslet provided her voice to Moominvalley, an animated television series about the Moomins, and took on a leading role alongside Susan Sarandon and Mia Wasikowska in Blackbird, a remake of the Danish film Silent Heart (2014). Winslet next portrayed paleontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite (2020), a romance between Anning and Charlotte Murchison (played by Saoirse Ronan) set in 1840s England. She collaborated closely with Ronan, and they choreographed their sex scenes. For much of the filming, she lived in isolation in a rented cottage in Dorset, where the film was shot, to get into her character's headspace.

A co-founder of the charity Golden Hat Foundation, which aims to create autism awareness, she has written a book on the topic, The Golden Hat: Talking Back to Autism (2010). Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009, and in 2012, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Winslet has been married to businessman Edward Abel Smith since 2012.