When was the first time you saw Kate Winslet? Sure, the English actress officially came into moviegoers' view as one-half of a dysfunctional, desperate-to-love pair of teenage murderesses in Peter Jackson's 1994 "Heavenly Creatures." But most people have a moment and a movie when they really, truly saw her.
That sense of discovery is crucial to every Winslet performance. But she doesn't force it; often it's just the opposite. Sometimes she's still as a ghost, as if she were always there, waiting for the camera to come around.
The shadowy entrance she makes inside a tunnel at the beginning of "The Reader," which earned Winslet a sixth Oscar nomination in 14 years - a record for someone 33 years old - will forever haunt the young man who meets her there in director Stephen Daldry's Holocaust drama.
For her character, Hanna Schmitz, is not who she appears to be, not when Michael (David Kross) meets her when he's a teenager in Berlin in the '50s - and Hanna is in her mid-30s - nor when he reencounters her years later and discovers her culpability in Nazi atrocities.
But "The Reader" is, among other things, about reconciling truth and memory, perception and reality. And Hanna is someone who runs from all of those things, leaving Michael to try and understand why she did what she did.
In Winslet's other major movie of 2008, "Revolutionary Road," her character, April, is first glimpsed at a party, the camera lazily scoping the room until it finds her - and stops. Just like Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Wheeler, we, too, have no need to look further: She's our focus. And like Frank, we'll try damn hard to figure her out.
In 1995's "Sense and Sensibility," the first time Oscar noticed her, she was a Jane Austen spitfire in a bonnet. In "Iris," she was the young Iris Murdoch, grabbing life but unaware of the ravages it would inflict. (She got noticed for that, too - Best Supporting Actress, same as "Sense.")
And in "Little Children" - the last time she got a Best Actress nom - she's first seen sitting quietly on a bench in a playground, aching so badly for a life beyond motherhood it hurts.
"Titanic" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" were her other Best Actress chances, and two parts on either side of a mountain: modern woman in the making, and modern woman unraveling. (In "Eternal Sunshine," she almost hops out of her seat in front of Jim Carrey while they ride the LIRR, a girl with blue streaks in her hair, talking a blue streak.)
In all of these films - and others of hers as different as "Jude," "Quills," "Finding Neverland" and "The Holiday" - Winslet can be counted on to just connect. And every time she shows up, no matter the character, we see something new.By Joe Neumaier
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