Kate Winslet held in the tears but not the earthy remembrance of standing in front of the mirror as an 8-year-old kid, pretending her shampoo bottle was an Oscar. Accepting the lead actress trophy for her performance as a former German concentration camp guard in "The Reader," she noted gaily, "Well, it's not a shampoo bottle now!"
To her fellow nominees, she said, "I think we can't all believe we're in the same category as Meryl Streep at all." To a slightly chagrined Streep, she added merrily, "I'm sorry, Meryl, you just have to suck that up."
Twenty-five years from now, when Winslet is about Streep's age, it is likely that the 33-year-old Reading, England, native will have ascended into the older actress' hallowed circle as perhaps the greatest actress of her generation. First nominated for an Oscar at age 21, Winslet went winless until this year with her sixth Oscar nod.
Winslet's composure on Sunday night was a far cry from her teary Golden Globe acceptance speeches, which made her stiff-upper-lip countrymen cringe, and from her early performances in Hollywood.
Even earlier on the Oscar red carpet, she was less composed. She was literally trembling. "I was fine until two hours ago. Now I'm scared. I started getting very nervous . . . right now I'm just trying to calm down."
The actress burst onto the scene with Peter Jackson's creepy 1994 film "Heavenly Creatures," playing an Aussie schoolgirl in an obsessive, ultimately murderous relationship with a female school chum.
"She scared the hell out of me," recalls the Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein, who released that early film and also distributed "The Reader."
In those early days, Winslet managed to be somehow modern and independent-minded, even when wearing a corset. Her characters, like her Marianne in "Sense and Sensibility" or Ophelia in "Hamlet," seem tinged with madness or at least with emotions so big they threatened to topple them.
Her early penchant for costume dramas had initially dissuaded James Cameron from even considering her for the part of Rose in his epic "Titanic," a prejudice he reconsidered after seeing almost every actress in the 18-to-21 age range. "She was already known as 'Corset Kate,' " recalls the director, who admits, "When I met her, all that intellectualizing went out the window."
