Kate Winslet, acclaimed BAFTA-winning actress and Titanic star, has shared that she wants to be “terrified and surprised by a role.”
Winslet, who won BAFTAs for Sense and Sensibility, and The Reader, told the audience at a special Life in Pictures event that Titanic’s success made her “frantic”.
“I just loved the script and I loved the part,” she said.
“[But] I can honestly say I wasn’t able to even really enjoy the success of Titanic because it was so frantic. I just thought, ‘Well I’ll throw myself into work and concentrate and just do the work and make sure that I’m following my instincts, and that I must hang on to.’”
From sandwiches to star
Winslet also spoke in her interview with Briony Hanson about how she remembers the moment she heard she’d won her first major film role. the role was in the drama Heavenly Creatures and she was working in a Reading deli when she got the news.
“The telephone rang, and I don’t know what it was but there was something about the way the telephone rang that day that I went, ‘It’s for me’,” she said.
“I left the sandwich and I left work and I went home on the bus and told everybody that I’d got this part!”
Powerful female roles
From that very first call Winslet has had a career that’s seen her star in features as diverse as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children and The Reader – where she played a woman with a guilty past.
“I remember thinking, I’m not going to be able to sympathise with her,” she said.
“But if I can play this role as honestly as possible, and if I can get this audience to feel alarmed by the fact that they feel some degree of empathy for this woman, OK then that’s my job.”
