The actor Kate Winslet called a “fucking genius”
Genius is a term that gets bandied around so often that it’s started to lose a lot of its meaning, but Kate Winslet opted to underline the praise being showered onto one of her co-stars by throwing a few foul-mouthed flourishes into the mix just to drive the point home.
There’s no shortage of figures both in and outside of the industry who’d use the very same term to describe Winslet, and even those who disagree would surely acknowledge that, at the very least, she’s one of the greatest actors of her generation and one of the most consistently acclaimed performers of the modern era.
Since first breaking out as a teenager in Peter Jackson’s 1994 biographical drama Heavenly Creatures, Winslet hasn’t taken her foot off the gas. Along the way, she’s been hoovering up accolades like they’ve been going out of fashion, and her current era finds her weaving between film and television and thriving on both fronts.
If somebody with an Academy Award win from seven nominations, five Baftas from a dozen nods, a pair of Primetime Emmy victories, a quintet of Golden Globes, and even a Grammy under their belt calls one of their fellow professionals a “fucking genius,” then it would be foolish to disagree.
However, it was a director who took some convincing of her own merits, even if Winslet’s instincts were right on the money when she generated endless chemistry with her preferred co-star in the highest-grossing movie ever made. Still, James Cameron isn’t a director who bows to the demands of mere mortals, but it’s impossible to imagine Titanic without her sharing the screen with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Their fortunes couldn’t have been more different, though. Cameron wanted DiCaprio to play Jack, but he wasn’t entirely convinced. Winslet, meanwhile, had been actively lobbying for the part of Rose after it had been offered to a number of other actors, including Clare Danes, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Winona Ryder.
Winslet eventually wore Cameron down, but DiCaprio remained on the fence. As fate would have it, they were both in attendance at the Cannes Film Festival during his negotiation period, which gave her the perfect opportunity to strike. She found out where he was staying and made a beeline for his hotel room, where she gave him the hard sell.
“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to persuade him to do this because I’m not doing it without him, and that’s all there is to it,'” she told Rolling Stone. “‘I will have him’. Because he is fucking brilliant. He’s a fucking genius, and that was absolutely why.”
Whether or not Winslet was the deal-breaker remains up for debate, but their relationship became much more than that of mere co-stars, with the Oscar-winning pair remaining close friends almost 30 years after they made their way towards Titanic in markedly different ways.
