Kate Winslet

**Kate Elizabeth Winslet** (born 5 October 1975) is an English actress. She is particularly known for her work in period dramas and tragedies, and is often drawn to portraying troubled women. Winslet is the recipient of several accolades, including three British Academy Film Awards, and is among the few performers to have won Academy, Emmy, and Grammy Awards. She portrays the character Ronal in *Avatar: The Way of Water* and *Avatar 3*.

## Biography

### Early life

Kate Winslet was born on 5 October 1975 in Reading, Berkshire, England, to Sally Anne (née Bridges) and Roger John Winslet. Her mother worked as a nanny and waitress, and her father, a struggling actor, took labouring 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 10, 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 that her parents always made them feel cared for and that they were a supportive family.

Winslet attended St Mary and All Saints' Church of England primary school. Living in a family of 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. She said that she did not let this defeat her. 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 dubbed for foreign films. At school, she was made head girl and 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 worked simultaneously with the Starmaker Theatre Company in Reading. She participated in over 20 of their stage productions, but was rarely selected as the lead due to her weight. Nonetheless, she played key roles as Miss Agatha Hannigan in *Annie*, the Mother Wolf in *The Jungle Book*, and Lena Marelli in *Bugsy Malone*.

### Career

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 from the job, and at 16, a lack of funds forced Winslet to leave Redroofs. 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. 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. She next took on the role of the young daughter of a bankrupt middle-aged 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*.

She made her first film debut playing a teenage murderess in the New Zealand biographical drama *Heavenly Creatures* (1994), directed by Peter Jackson. For her following role in *Sense and Sensibility* (1994), she won the BAFTA Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She went on to star in two period dramas in 1996, *Jude* and *Hamlet*, solidifying her reputation for portraying complicated, complex female characters with a "mad edge". She was launched into global stardom for her lead role in James Cameron's 1997 film *Titanic*, starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. She went on to star in several small, low budget films, as well as several more larger and critically acclaimed films, such as *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind* (2004), *Little Children* (2004), *The Reader* (2008), and *Steve Jobs* (2015). She portrayed the lead villain Jeannie Matthews in the science fiction dystopian film *Divergent* (2014), and reprised the role in the film's sequel, *Insurgent* (2015). Her latest roles include *Wonder Wheel* (2017), *Blackbird* (2019), and *Ammonite* (2020).

Aside from her acting roles, Winslet has also served as a voice actor in many animated TV shows, films, and shorts, such as *Flushed Away* (2006), *Swift* (2019) and *Moominvalley* (2019-2020). She has provided narration for several audiobooks, and received critical acclaim for her performance of the song "What If" for the soundtrack of *Christmas Carol: The Movie* (2001). She is the co-founder of the Golden Hat Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting awareness and acceptance of autistic individuals. In 2010, she released a book on the topic, *The Golden Hat: Talking Back to Autism*.