PRACTICE makes perfect – and no-one should know that better than Kate Winslet. Thirteen years after her first Oscar nomination, the star of Stephen Daldry's acclaimed film The Reader finally got her hands on one of the little golden figurines she had dreamed of possessing since she was a child.
"I'd be lying if I hadn't made a version of this speech before. I think I was probably eight years old and staring into the bathroom mirror. And this (holding up her statuette] would've been a shampoo bottle," Winslet, dressed in a gunmetal grey Yves
Saint Laurent dress, told the glamorous audience at Sunday night's ceremony in LA.
"Well, it's not a shampoo bottle now! I feel very fortunate to have made it all the way from there to here."
With the pick of roles now before her, this Oscar win is likely to take Winslet into the ranks of Hollywood's highest earners. When Reese Witherspoon won Best Actress for Walk The Line three years ago she became Hollywood's top-paid actress, claiming up to $20 million a film.
Victory has made Winslet the toast of such diverse figures as Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner, who has declared he wants to feature her in his magazine, to Gordon Brown who, in a slightly more formal response, said: "We want to thank her for her great success in winning an Oscar for Britain, showing that the film industry in Britain is the best in the world."
Despite being hotly tipped to take this year's Academy Award, she hadn't been taking anything for granted. She's had five previous nominations for the acting world's top prize, but always left Hollywood's most glittering bash empty handed. So, she admitted, she had been practising her losing face.
"You have no idea how well I practised that face. It was a good face. Oh, yeah, you get good at practising that face," she laughed. "And having been here before and lost to be here and win, I've got to tell you, winning is really a lot better than losing."
David Edelstein of New York magazine may hail her as "the best English-speaking film actress of her generation" but, despite garnering a shelf-full of awards on this side of the Atlantic, including three Baftas (for 1995's Sense and Sensibility, Little Children in 2006 and this year for The Reader), she had failed to pick up a gong in the US until this week.
Now aged 33, she was just 20 when she won her first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actress for her role as Marianne Dashwood in an adaptation of Austen's well-loved tale. Two years later, she became the youngest person to have had two Oscar nominations when her performance as Rose in Titanic earned her another, but she lost out to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets.
Her portrayal of a youthful Iris Murdoch led to another supporting actress nomination for Winslet in 2001. Her quirky Clementine in Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind gained her a best actress nomination in 2004, but the title was claimed by Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby. Winslet was again put forward for best actress for 2006's Little Children. That time she lost out to another British actress, Helen Mirren in The Queen.
Now at last, she has won the accolade many feel is long overdue. From the tightly-laced Marianne to the passionate Sarah in Little Children, Winslet has certainly excelled in widely varying roles. Although motherhood has been a recurring theme for her, and most of her characters share a non-conformist streak, she has never put herself in danger of being typecast.
But her intense performance in The Reader as Hanna Schmitz, a former concentration camp guard whose one-time teenage lover discovers she has a secret she thinks more shaming than her Nazi past, ranks among her most serious and complex roles and most feel her award, in the face of tough competition, was richly deserved.
"She's a transformative actress," says Daldry. "That's what Kate is. She's a proper actress. She doesn't do a version of herself."
As Winslet's star shines at its brightest yet, commentators predict it will continue to rise for years to come. Rachel Abramowitz of the LA Times declared yesterday: "Twenty-five years from now, when Winslet is about (fellow nominee Meryl] Streep's age, it is likely… (Winslet] will have ascended into the older actress' hallowed circle as perhaps the greatest actress of her generation."
