Actress. Born October 5, 1975 in Reading, England. The grandaughter of two theater managers (her maternal grandparents founded Reading Repertory Theatre) and the daughter of two actors, Winslet began acting as a child, making her first appearance on British television at age seven in a cereal commercial. In 1988, she appeared in the TV series Shrinks; three years later, she left school to pursue her fledgling acting career.
Winslet appeared on the British stage in productions such as Adrian Mole and Peter Pan and had a recurring role on the British sitcom Get Back before landing her debut film role, in Heavenly Creatures (1994), directed by Peter Jackson. In the film, Winslet played Juliet Hulme, a schoolgirl with tuberculosis whose obsessive friendship with a classmate leads the two girls to murder the classmate’s mother in order to avoid separation.

Winslet attracted even more attention with her next role, as the winsome Marianne Dashwood in Ang Lee’s film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, costarring Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman. As the “sensibility” of the movie, Winslet earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. After several similarly high-brow roles, in such features as Jude (1995, based on the Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure) and as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), Winslet landed squarely on the A-list of leading ladies with her performance as Rose DeWitt, the heroine of James Cameron’s record-breaking blockbuster Titanic. The film won numerous Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and launched costar Leonardo DiCaprio to heartthrob status. Winslet scored her second Oscar nomination for acting—this time for Best Actress. (Her costar, Gloria Stuart, earned a nod in the supporting category for her portrayal of the older Rose DeWitt; the two actresses became the first ever to earn nominations for playing the same character.)
On the heels of her first Titanic hit, Winslet made two somewhat unlikely choices for her next projects: Hideous Kinky (1999), in which she played a free-spirited single mother who brings her two daughters along on a spiritual quest to Marrakech; and Holy Smoke (also 1999), the Jane Campion-directed film about a young woman who joins a religious cult. The film’s frank depiction of the sexual connection between Winslet and Harvey Keitel (as a man hired by the woman’s family to “deprogram” her) displayed Winslet’s unselfconsciousness and her talent for portraying physical and emotional nudity onscreen.

That same year, Winslet costarred as a code-breaker in the World War II-era spy drama Enigma (released in the U.S. in 2002). In 2002, she appeared as a reporter interviewing a death-row inmate in The Life of David Gale, costarring Kevin Spacey and Laura Linney. In 2004, Winslet starred opposite Jim Carrey in Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Winslet has one daughter, Mia, with her ex-husband, Jim Threapleton. The couple met on the set of Hideous Kinky, for which he was the assistant director, married in late 1998 and were divorced in December 2001. In 2003, Winslet married Sam Mendes, the noted British stage director and Oscar-winning director of