Kate Winslet names her biggest acting inspiration: “She was a real person”
Kate Winslet was most inspired by an actress who eventually became her co-star.
No list of the best actresses working today would be complete without mentioning Kate Winslet, who has been appearing in critically acclaimed films for three decades now. Winslet was first recognized in a major way when she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Sense and Sensibility, which led her down a run where she worked with some of the most acclaimed filmmakers of their era.
Although Winslet was at many times one of the most famous people in the world, she has remained relatively humble when citing the people that inspired her. She may have listed many individuals that taught her some of the tricks of the trade, but Winslet told Backstage that there was one actress who she looked up to more than anyone else.
“I have to say it’s Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, because she’s not acting,” Winslet said. “This is what inspired me so much, specifically from that performance, and specifically from Jodie; when I saw her onscreen when I was younger, I just couldn’t work out exactly what it was that she was doing, because it wasn’t, to my mind, what I had believed acting was. She wasn’t acting. She was just this person.”
Foster’s role in Taxi Driver is often cited as one of the most famous debuts by a young star ever, as she showed a remarkable degree of maternity, and even earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. Although it kicked off an era in which Foster appeared in many successful films, Winslet said that it was the authenticity of her work in Taxi Driver that made her want to achieve a similar degree of authenticity in her own career.
“She wasn’t an actress,” Winslet said. “She was a real person who kept showing up. I kept seeing her in things, and that, for me, was a real penny-drop moment. I was like, ‘Well, that’s it,’ because it’s about being, isn’t it? It’s not about acting. The trick is to be it and not have them see that you’re “acting” being it.”
What’s remarkable is that Winslet ended up developing a career that was fairly similar to Foster’s. While Winslet wasn’t quite as young as Foster when she first started out, she did have a series of acclaimed roles early on that led her to appear in an all-time great masterpiece. Both actresses appeared in Best Picture winners; Foster led the cast of The Silence of the Lambs, and Winslet was at the centre of Titanic.
Foster may have Winslet beat at the Oscars, as she earned two Best Actress prizes early on in her career for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs; by the time that Winslet finally won the Best Actress award for Revolutionary Road, she was considered to be “overdue.” However, both women have found a second life in their career thanks to prestige HBO shows, as Foster led the latest season of True Detective, and Winslet earned Emmys for her work in Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown.
The one time that Winslet and Foster got the chance to play opposite one another was in 2011’s Carnage, a dark comedy from director Roman Polanski. Although they are cast as two bickering mothers who despite one another, that doesn’t even slightly respect the way that they feel about one another in real life.
