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Ranked

Kate Winslet's 20 best performances

ranked!
by Andrew Pulver

Extracting every nuance ... Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Thu 17 Sep 2020 14.20 BST

20. The Dressmaker 2015

Points for ambition as Kate Winslet joined the comeback effort of Australian director
Jocelyn “Proof” Moorhouse, who had not released a film since the mid-90s. Winslet
plays a star dressmaker on a gruesome revenge trip back to the outback town where
she grew up. Tonally, The Dressmaker is all over the place, but Winslet is game.

19. Contagion 2011

Winslet plays an Epidemic Intelligence Service agent – of all the most horribly relevant
things – in Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller that everyone is now digging out of
the DVD crate. Winslet puts up a decent show in a big-name ensemble cast, but her role
is necessarily small.

18. Iris 2001

A role she could do in her sleep ... Winslet as the young Iris Murdoch in Iris. Photograph: Buena Vista/PA

Richard Eyre’s biopic of Iris Murdoch was dominated by the heartrending rapport
between Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent as the author and her husband as dementia
took over their relationship. Winslet was cast as Dench’s younger counterpart, a free-
spirited student bicycling around Oxford – a role she could do in her sleep.

17. Enigma 2001

A solid wartime thriller – now somewhat overshadowed by The Imitation Game –
adapted from Robert Harris’s novel about the activities of the Bletchley Park
codebreakers. Winslet, in intellectual Coke-bottle specs, helps lovelorn Dougray Scott
track down missing glamourpuss Saffron Burrows; Winslet was starting to grow out of
this sort of thing, but she gives a good account of herself.

16. Hamlet 1996

One from the early, pre-Titanic days. As was once her wont, Winslet gives it both
barrels as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s impressively mounted production: she is a
screaming fury.

15. Quills 2000

Winslet in one of her less glamorous parts: her washerwoman Madeleine, in the
notorious Charenton hospital, catches the eye of the Marquis de Sade, confined there
in his later years. It all looks a bit queasy now, and Winslet – strong as ever – has to
contend with a slightly boring role.

14. Jude 1996

Mood changes ... with Christopher Eccleston in Jude. Photograph: Allstar/BBC

Playing opposite Christopher Eccleston, Winslet lights up Michael Winterbottom’s

sturdy Thomas Hardy adaptation as the flighty Sue Bridehead. Though perhaps a little
callow compared to what came later, Winslet looks very good here, switching from
mood to mood as the story demands.

13. Flushed Away 2006

With a severely altered patina as a result of Aardman’s decision to ditch stop-motion
for full CGI, this is, if we are being honest, the animation outfit’s least distinguished
full-length film. It’s also their starriest, with Winslet joining Hugh Jackman, Ian
McKellen and Jean Reno for a middleweight sewer-bound yarn. Decent, without being
spectacular.

12. Holy Smoke 1999

Winslet with Harvey Keitel in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke. Photograph: Allstar/Miramax/Sportsphoto

Once she attained industry clout, Winslet always sought out major directorial names,
so her connection with Jane Campion was something of a no-brainer. This once
seemed a bit of an oddity in the Campion canon, an idiosyncratic change of pace after
the high Hollywood literariness of Portrait of a Lady, with Winslet playing a guru-
follower subjected to deprogramming by counsellor Harvey Keitel. Now, though, it
looks a bit like a rehearsal for Top of the Lake.

11. Mildred Pierce 2011

Winslet is not the type to spread herself too thinly, so the fashionable flood of event TV
doesn’t figure much on her CV. This, though, must have been a can’t-refuse: the role
made famous by Joan Crawford, with the impeccably stylish Todd “Far From Heaven”
Haynes at the controls. Winslet won some of her best reviews for yet another essay in
the defiantly unglamorous.

10. Little Children 2006

Winslet evolved into a Hollywood heavyweight in the mid-2000s, and this ensemble
drama – from another highly regarded awards-bait director, Todd Field – got her her
third best actress Oscar nomination. She offered a finely detailed performance as an
unhappily married woman who connects with an equally unhappily married dad
(Patrick Wilson) in a John Cheever-esque study of suburban malaise and emotional
immaturity.

9. Steve Jobs 2015

Though the vast majority of the acting fireworks belong to Michael Fassbender in the
title role (“charismatic maverick” turned up to 11), Winslet is excellent in the dressed-
down, dark-wigged role of Joanna Hoffman, Apple marketing guru and provider of
emotional content in this Aaron Sorkin-scripted, Danny Boyle-directed showpiece.
Winslet got another Oscar nomination – for best supporting actress – which was well
deserved; but she is a little under-served by the drama, where Hoffman is slightly
boringly pigeonholed as the Voice of Conscience. She makes it work though.

8. Carnage 2011
Winslet has gone on record saying she regrets working with Polanski (as well as Woody
Allen), so it’s tricky to know how to take this now. Remove Polanski’s name from the
equation and this looks like an actors’ showcase of high calibre (if a little self-
consciously so). Winslet and her business-guy husband Christoph Waltz are meeting
Jodie Foster and John C Reilly to talk over their sons’ fight; politeness soon turns to
irritation and then flat-out rage. It’s another heavyweight turn for Winslet, another of
the upscale American types she has got very good at.

7. Titanic 1997
The big one ... Titanic. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy

The big one. As Rose Dewitt Bukater, Winslet offers bit of a route one performance as a
teenage socialite suffocated by a financially advantageous betrothal, liberated by
contact with Leonardo DiCaprio’s roughneck artist. But in such an epic, go-for-the-
throat popular spectacle, it was undoubtedly what was needed. (Cameron has said he
originally wanted an Audrey Hepburn type, which Winslet fundamentally is not.)
Oddly, DiCaprio seemed to do a little better out of Titanic’s planet-conquering success,
almost immediately graduating to Spielberg and Scorsese pictures; it took Winslet a bit
longer to crack the Hollywood elite.

6. Hideous Kinky 1998

So what did Winslet do with her Titanic kudos? She went straight on to this adaptation
of Esther Freud’s 70s-set novel about a spiritual-seeking woman who decamps to
Morocco with her kids. Winslet’s free-spirit side was given full rein in what was her
first solo lead; apart from anything else, she proved she could carry a film on her own –
something that, strangely, she has not had much opportunity to do since.

5. The Reader 2008

Oscar winner ... Winslet in The Reader.
Photograph: The Weinstein Company/EPA

Winslet finally got her long-awaited best actress Oscar for this adaptation of Bernard
Schlink’s acclaimed war-guilt novel. Directed by Stephen Daldry, written by David
Hare, and co-starring Ralph Fiennes, it’s about as awards-baity as you can get – and
that’s even before the Holocaust-themed subject matter. Winslet has the tricky task of
making an empathetic character study out of a closed-off former death-camp guard: an
impressive achievement, considering her naturally outgoing personality.

4. Heavenly Creatures 1994

Winslet wasn’t a total unknown when she was cast in Peter Jackson’s remarkable true-
crime drama: she had done Dark Secrets on TV and had a bit part in medical soap
Casualty. But in this, her first full-length feature, she was a revelation as the affluent
English teenager Juliet, who develops an obsessive relationship with put-upon
working class New Zealander Pauline and ends in murder. Jackson’s deployment of
then-pioneering visual effects to evoke the girls’ elaborate fantasy world is what makes
the film stand out. But Winslet’s ability to infuse her complex character with an
unshakeable naturalness put her on the map.

3. Sense and Sensibility 1995

Holding her own with the big beasts of British acting ... Winslet with Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. Photograph:
Allstar/Columbia

Winslet’s looks make her perfect for period material; that she has largely swerved
crinoline-based roles is no doubt down to a wish not to be typecast. This early one,
though, is really special; she plays the guileless, lovelorn Marianne Dashwood, getting
over dashing Greg Wise to wind up with soberly intense Alan Rickman. One of those
films where, serendipitously, absolutely everyone is at the top of their game (none
more so than Emma Thompson, as writer-star), this was Winslet’s chance to prove she
could hold her own with the big beasts of British acting.

2. Revolutionary Road 2008

A prestige adaptation, directed by Winslet’s then-husband Sam Mendes and reuniting
her with her Titanic confreres DiCaprio and Kathy Bates. Revolutionary Road’s status
as a literary cult meant this film couldn’t have been more machine-tooled as an Oscar-
contending film; the only surprise is that it only scored three nominations, and didn’t
win any. Winslet, arguably, has the most powerful role, as a frustrated housewife in
1950s New England suburbia, in a troubled marriage and failing in an attempt at an
acting career. Even more than Little Children, this showcased Winslet’s elevation to the
Hollywood acting A-list: perfectly coiffed, beautifully dressed, and extracting every
nuance possible from a given scene. Cate Blanchett-level stuff, in other words.
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004

The Total Recal of romcoms ... with Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Photograph: David Lee/AP

Winslet was still – just – in her scruffy, early-career mode when she made this
mindbending fantasy opposite a cast-very-much-against-type Jim Carrey – although
she was clearly savvy enough to align herself with top envelope-pushing talents Michel
Gondry and Charlie Kaufman. Not many actors could have survived this Total Recall of
romcoms with multiple hair-dye jobs, but Winslet successfully accesses her free-spirit
locker once again (so much so that her Clementine is often cited as an early example of
the Manic Pixie Dream Girl phenomenon that blighted mid-2000s indie comedy). Be
that as it may, Winslet is tremendously engaging here, and manages the time jumps
and perspective shifts with aplomb. Perhaps most importantly, though, it showed she
could do contemporary as effectively as period, giving her the chance to make inroads
into modern-day drama and thereby cement her place in the big league. Plus, it’s just a
great film.

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