Complete Control

Kate Winslet has been a screen icon for three decades. Now she's stepped behind the camera to direct her first feature film

- BY JENNIFER H. CUNNINGHAM AND KYLE MCGOVERN

KATE WINSLET has made a career out of playing strong, confident, forthright women: Lee Miller, Mare Sheehan, Rose DeWitt Bukater, Clementine Kruczynski. Her resume is studded with awards recognition (an Academy Award for Best Actress for 2008's The Reader, a pair of Emmys for playing the eponymous characters in HBO’s Mare of Easttown in 2021 and Mildred Pierce in 2011, an armful of BAFTAs across a 27-year span) and boasts cumulative box-office earnings in the billions (working with James Cameron on a couple of Avatar sequels and Titanic certainly helps there).

The native of Reading, England, is practiced at toggling between those large-scale productions with swollen budgets and smaller, independent fare. Her filmography is loaded with prestige literary adaptations—Sense and Sensibility (1995), Revolutionary Road (2008), The Reader, to name a few—as well as several daring originals, like 2004’s amnesiac-romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the first movie in which she appeared, the 1994 true crime tale Heavenly Creatures.

In person, the 50-year-old star projects pure composure. Speaking with Editor-in-Chief Jennifer H. Cunningham at Newsweek's global headquarters in New York City, Winslet carries herself with the kind of centeredness that comes with experience. When discussing her life in the spotlight and the scrutiny it has brought her, she refers to her journey as being “hard-won.” Asked how she has navigated this high-altitude career while being a mother of three, the actress is quick to acknowledge that she’s had a rare kind of privilege.

"There's nothing to fear. You have just as much right to be in those positions...make sure there's opportunity where you feel there isn't and pursue the dream."