At nearly 33 years old (eight days and counting) and with five Academy Award nominations under her belt, Kate Winslet may just be the greatest actress of her generation. Her work has not yet revealed any limitations. Like Meryl Streep, she offers an authenticity in her work, even the lesser films. She seems incapable of uttering a false line. She defines authenticity at every turn.
Her work in “Titanic” transcended the material, a shoddy screenplay that saw her running about the doomed boat making decisions about what to do next, and I’ll be damned if Winslet did not make it work. In the hands of a lesser actress, the performance, and perhaps the role, would have come across as silly, but she made a character out of Rose we dared to care about.
There was heat between Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio on the screen. We believed the love, we believed the devotion, and she did this at a very young age. Earlier still she had gone toe-to-toe with Emma Thomson and Alan Rickman in “Sense & Sensibility,” earning an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actress. Further back, you’ll witness chilling work in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” and one sees a major actress developing before our very eyes.