Listen to Kate Winslet’s curious Christmas song
Maybe Rose survived James Cameron’s Titanic thanks to her undying Christmas spirit, embracing the cold like a soothing safety blanket. It would certainly make some sort of sense in the context of actor Kate Winslet’s peculiar love for the holiday season, appearing in three Christmas flicks throughout her decades-long career, even performing the soundtrack for one of the festive films.
Each of these festive films is thinly spread throughout her career and vary greatly in terms of significance, with the latest Christmas release being the 2019 TV movie The Christmas Letter, co-starring Caitríona Balfe and Fiona Shaw. A low-budget animated release, the movie didn’t manage to drum up much excitement with critics, let alone the young target audience, but her previous festive foray had far more success.
Her most famous festive appearance came in the 2006 movie The Holiday, co-starring Jack Black, Cameron Diaz and Jude Law, a celebrated Christmas movie which has fared a lot better among audiences than it ever did with critics.
But, the festive song in question appeared in the 2001 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, an entirely forgettable venture that came and went without making a splash at all. Co-starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Gambon, Rhys Ifans and Simon Callow, the peculiarly star-studded cast couldn’t muster up any movie magic, with the film being most memorable for its peculiar song performed by Kate Winslet herself.
Getting to number six in the UK music charts, ‘What If’ is a bizarre ballad sung by Winslet’s Belle as she laments the end of her and Scrooge’s relationship in the film. Whilst the film didn’t reach any commercial heights in the UK, the song became a number-one hit in Austria and Ireland, entered the top ten in Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and even won the 2002 OGAE Song Contest.
Speaking about her short music career, Winslet sat down with Greg James for an interview with BBC Radio 1 and broke down her entire memory of the song from start to finish. “So I provided the voice for an animated version of A Christmas Carol, and the producers come to me, and they say, ‘Oh, we’d like to give your character a song’, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a nice idea’, and they said, ‘would you like to sing it?’”.
Mulling over the idea, she admitted to the producers that she wasn’t much of a singer, before stating: “I’ll give it a go, and if you think it’s crap, I really don’t mind if you just ditch it and get a proper person to do it…so I recorded the song, they were pleased enough to say ‘no we’re gonna do it’”. Choosing to release it as a single as well, Winslet agreed, but only on one condition: “that no one makes any money from it and all the proceeds go to children’s charities”.
So, whilst it may seem like a mistake for Winslet, at least good things came out of her Christmas record, as she raised a considerable amount of cash for children in need, and made a great case for why she should never release a commercial single ever again.
