Is there nothing Kate Winslet can’t do? This month, she makes her directorial debut with Goodbye June, a seasonal family tale written by her son Joe Anders, in which she also stars.
In her 32-year career, Winslet has earned seven Oscar nominations (and one win), five Baftas and Golden Globes, and a CBE presented by the Queen. And while she’s occasionally ventured into television (see Mildred Pierce, Mare of Easttown), the newly 50-year-old remains best-known for her work on the big screen.
Winslet’s filmography is remarkably strong. She gradually evolved from period drama regular to contemporary leading lady, working with filmmakers as diverse as James Cameron, Jane Campion and Michel Gondry along the way. To celebrate the Brit’s latest venture, here’s a look at her best 11 films.
11. The Holiday (2006)
Okay, so Nancy Meyers’ glorified Hallmark Christmas movie requires suspension of disbelief, but it’s fun to see Winslet give in to her frothier, funnier and indeed festive sides.
The actor was apprehensive about playing society columnist Iris Simpkins, a role that for the first time in her career required her to bring the laughs. But having soaked up vintage rom-coms like The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday, Winslet imbued the house swap tale with a winning screwball charm, holding her own against love interest wisecracker Jack Black and genre regular Cameron Diaz, the latter’s swanky Los Angeles pad providing a stark contrast to Iris’s chocolate box cottage. The guiltiest of Winslet’s pleasures.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Prime Video and Netflix
10. Hideous Kinky (1998)
While Leonardo DiCaprio headed straight for swashbuckling multiplex fare in the wake of Titanic’s monumental success, his co-star went a little more arthouse, a clever approach that set the versatile tone for the rest of her career. Based on Esther Freud’s same-named semi-autobiographical novel, Hideous Kinky sees Winslet play a twenty-something single mother who decides to escape her humdrum life in early 1970s London for a new adventure in Morocco.
Directed by Scottish filmmaker Gillies MacKinnon, the evocative multi-cultural drama not only proved that Winslet had a keen eye for the leftfield, but that she could also single-handedly carry a picture, too.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
9. The Reader (2008)
Remember the Extras episode in whicha self-parodying Winslet told Ricky Gervais that Holocaust films were the easiest way to get an Oscar? Well, it turns out that the real Winslet was taking note. Just four years later, she was crowned Best Actress after appearing in The Reader as, what else, but a Nazi concentration camp guard? Many critics believed she’d been rewarded for the wrong film (see my number 4 entry).
But while Stephen Daldry’s war guilt drama does succumb to many of the awards bait tropes, it’s still a powerful watch that doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions. Forced to undergo a gruelling seven hours in the make-up chair for the latter-day scenes, Winslet gives a typically committed performance, which continually shifts your sympathy – no mean feat for a character with such a horrific past.
Available to buy or rent from YouTube, Prime Video and Apple TV
8. Lee (2023)
Winslet appeared to lose her way a little in the second half of the 2010s, bouncing from flop to flop (Triple 9, Collateral Beauty, The Mountain Between Us) in a series of films that would once have been considered beneath her. But she bounced back in the 2020s, firstly withsame-sex romance Ammonite and then this compelling portrait of fashion model-turned-World War II photographer Lee Miller, which she also produced.
Lee might stick rigidly to the biopic conventions, but the passion project – it took eight years to get off the ground, while Winslet also paid for two weeks of the cast and crew’s salaries out of her own pocket – still captures all the complexities of a resilient and uncompromising trailblazer whose images continue to resonate.
Streaming on Now
7. Steve Jobs (2015)
Winslet looked almost unrecognisable as Steve Jobs’s mousy-haired, plainly dressed work wife in the late Apple founder’s episodic biopic. But her Oscar-nominated performance certainly didn’t fade into the background.
As the Polish-born marketing executive Joanna Hoffman, the star makes light work of Danny Boyle’s roving direction and Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue amid three vital press conferences that helped establish Jobs as the ultimate tech god. And Winslet, who spent a considerable amount of time with the real Hoffman as research, also builds a natural rapport with Michael Fassbender’s lead, explaining how the right-hand woman was able to draw out the humanity from a man obsessed with machines.
Available to buy or rent on Prime Video, Apple TV and Sky Store
6. Little Children (2006)
Winslet deservedly earned her third Best Actress Oscar nod for her nuanced performance in Todd Field’s Little Children. Adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel, the ensemble drama sees the Brit play Sarah Pierce, a bored mother-of-one with a porn-obsessed husband who finds a new lease of life when Patrick Wilson’s similarly unhappily married dad enters the fray.
Winslet’s performance captures the malaise and loneliness of domesticity, and the euphoria and wild abandon of new love. It’s one of her less showy performances, but it’s the kind that stays with you long after the credits roll.
Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and Sky Store
5. Revolutionary Road (2008)
Just two years later, Winslet played another desperate, but ultimately more tragic, housewife in this pure antithesis of a feel-good film. Indeed, Titanic obsessives excited about a reunion with DiCaprio were soon left rocking back and forth thanks to a thoroughly depressing, emotionally exhausting and brutally honest tale of a loveless marriage. Far removed from the star-crossed romance of Jack and Rose, the two A-listers play an utterly miserable couple dogged by extra-marital affairs, failed aspirations and the societal constraints of 1950s Connecticut.
While Revolutionary Road could never be described as an easy watch, it’s an ever-compelling one. And Winslet was integral in bringing Richard Yates’s novel to the screen, encouraging both DiCaprio and then-husband director Sam Mendes to come on board.
Streaming on Paramount+
4. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Following recurring roles in CBBC sci-fi Dark Season and Ray Winstone sitcom Get Back (and a one-off part in Casualty), Winslet made the giant leap to the big screen in a true crime drama like no other. And she made an instant impression thanks to an opening shot in which she charges towards the camera, screaming with her face covered in blood.
Continually blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures revisits the Parker-Hulme case that shocked 1950s New Zealand, with Winslet and fellow newcomer Melanie Lynskey playing two polar opposites who form an obsessive, otherworldly bond that ultimately leads to murder. Both deliver turns far beyond their years, Winslet also heightening the drama (and showing off some impressive pipes) by performing a Puccini aria.
Available to rent or buy on YouTube
3. Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Winslet briefly became typecast following her star-making turn in the definitive adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Yet there’s a reason why so many period dramas (Jude, Hamlet, Quills) soon courted her talents. The Brit initially auditioned for the lesser part of social climber Lucy Steele but impressed a previously sceptical Ang Lee so much, she was upgraded to the pivotal role of impulsive teenager Marianne Dashwood.
She certainly suffered for her art, spraining her wrist in a staircase fall and, thanks to 50 takes of the rain-soaked rescue scene, developing hypothermia. But her commitment, and ability to match thespians Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman as a fresh-faced 19-year-old, was deservedly rewarded with the first of many Oscar nominations.
Available to rent or buy on YouTube, Apple TV and Sky Store
2. Titanic (1997)
Winslet was so determined to play Rose DeWitt Bukater that she bombarded director James Cameron with telephoned pleas (“I am Rose! I don’t know why you’re even seeing anyone else!”). Amid gleeful tabloid predictions that Titanic would sink at the box office even quicker than the real thing, the Brit’s persistence initially looked to have backfired. Instead, it became a pop-cultural phenomenon, grossing more than a billion dollars, winning 11 Oscars and catapulting both Winslet and cherubic co-star DiCaprio into the Hollywood stratosphere.
While the latter caused plenty of swooning, the former provided the film’s beating heart, evolving from a spoiled socialite to plucky heroine with a blend of old-school glamour and modern empowerment. Nearly 30 years on, Titanic remains the definitive disaster epic.
Streaming on Disney+
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Assuming a character initially developed for Björk, Winslet freed herself from the shackles of the period drama with a distinctly modern romance from head-scratching auteur Michel Gondry. The star has never been goofier or more appealing than as Clementine Kruczynski, a scruffy free spirit so burned by her break-up with Jim Carrey’s introverted Joel (another inspired role reversal) that she undergoes a procedure to banish every memory of him.
Possessing far more agency than the Manic Pixie Dream Girls that followed (“Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a f**ked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind”), Clementine is so inherently charming that you can understand why Joel soon regrets taking the same drastic measure.
Streaming on Prime Video and Mubi
