Interviewee: Kate Winslet
Interviewer: Tavis Smiley
Date: January 10, 2009

Kate Elizabeth Winslet is an Oscar-winning English actress. With memorable and critically acclaimed performances in movies such as Titanic, Sense and Sensibility, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children, and The Reader, she is considered as “the best English-speaking actress of her generation.”

Born on October 5, 1975 in Reading, Berkshire, Kate Winslet comes from a family of thespians. Her maternal grandparents, Linda and Oliver Bridges, established and ran the Reading Repertory Theatre. An uncle, Robert Bridges, starred in Oliver! and two of her sisters, Beth and Anna Winslet, are also actresses.

As a child, Kate Winslet studied drama at the Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead, Berkshire and appeared in a TV advertisement for Sugar Puffs cereal. She debuted on the widescreen in the movie Heavenly Creatures directed by Peter Jackson. Although her next film would give her critical acclaim for her impressive performance as Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, she did not achieve international recognition until she starred as Rose DeWitt Butaker in one of the highest grossing films of all time, Titanic, in 1997.

Other films she has worked on include the biopic Iris (2001), the independent film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Holiday (2006), Little Children (2006) and the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road (2008).

Kate Winslet has achieved the distinction of being the youngest actor in history to have been given six Oscar nominations at the age of 33. She won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Reader. Aside from the Oscars, she has also won several awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the Emmy Awards.

For a time, Kate Winslet was a successful singer. A single she released, “What If”, which was part of the soundtrack for Christmas Carol: The Movie, topped the charts in Ireland, placed 6th in the UK, and won the OGAE Song Contest in 2002.

She is married to director Sam Mendes, with whom she has a son. Kate Winslet has a daughter named Mia from an earlier marriage.