“People were crying”: The eight songs Kate Winslet couldn’t live without
Kate Winslet may not be the youngest ever recipient of an actor award anymore, thanks to that precocious little upstart Owen Cooper and his ludicrously good performance in Adolescence, but she’s still a national treasure, even if there was plenty of room on that floating door for Leo and she let him drown anyway.
Winslet has been one of our most successful actors for 30 years now, and actually, people forget just how successful she’s been, so let’s just remind ourselves. She has been Oscar-nominated no less than seven times, winning once, plus Golden Globe-nominated 11 times, winning five, which puts her on a par with Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith, and she’s far from finished yet.
Last year, she moved into directing with her debut film behind the camera, the Netflix-backed Goodbye June starring Helen Mirren and written by Winslet’s son in a move that was in no way nepotistic, because she said even if he hadn’t been her son, she would have directed it anyway, which, to be frank, is absolute bollocks. Nevertheless, it got some decent, if not showstopping reviews, and it adds another tick on her CV to go with acting and, for those with long memories, singing.
Her recording career was a short, if surprisingly successful one, which occurred back in 2001 when she made a single for the film Christmas Carol The Movie called ‘What if?’, topping the charts in Ireland, Belgium and Austria and reaching number six in the UK top ten. All the proceeds went to charity, which is admirable, but it’s not a tune that Winslet herself remembers too fondly, asking for it to be turned off whenever she hears it.
What she would far rather hear instead is one of the eight songs she recently picked for the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, which ended up criss-crossing genres and eras and displayed some admirable taste, if not a little more of that fondness for family promotion we touched on earlier. That’s because her first choice was her own father, the actor Roger Winslet, singing a rendition of the standard ‘Georgia on My Mind’, a song he once performed in a doughnut shop in the middle of a jazz night soon after losing his wife, with Winslet recalling, “People were crying and clapping. There was an encore. That’s the magic of my dad”.
Next up, she chose ‘Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs’ by Manchester duo Brian and Michael, recalling playing the song over and over in her childhood, saying, “We would dance and dance on the threadbare, not very nice brown carpet of our little rental house and we’d leap and sing along”.
She followed that up with Seal’s ‘Kiss From a Rose’, a tune Winslet says helped her get over her nerves after passing her driving test in London: “I was a terrified young driver, and I would put this song on and I wouldn’t be scared to put the windows down, or flood the engine, or if people shouted at me, I’d just blast this song and it wouldn’t bloody matter.”
The next two songs Winslet picked out were ‘Summertime’ by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and ‘Nuvole Bianche’ by the Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi. Of the latter, Winslet said, “This one really does make me cry… the sparseness of it, the poetry of it. It’s an utterly extraordinary work”.
Number six on her list was Radiohead’s ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ from their astonishing 2007 album In Rainbows, about which she said, “We just love Radiohead in our house,” while seven was ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’ by Seattle folksters Fleet Foxes, a song she picked for a close personal friend who had set a home video of a holiday to the song.
Finally, she rounded things off with the influential 1980s dance track ‘Pump up the Jam’ by the Belgian artist Technotronic, remarking, “This is a song that my husband and I would both have been listening to as teenagers in different parts of the world. We absolutely love it, we leap about the house to it”.
Kate Winslet’s eight favourite songs:
- ‘Georgia on My Mind’ – Roger Winslet and Sophie Breakenridge
- ‘Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs’ – Brian and Michael
- ‘Kiss From a Rose’ – Seal
- ‘Summertime’ – Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
- ‘Nuvole Bianche’ – Ludovico Einaudi
- ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ – Radiohead
- ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’ – Fleet Foxes
- ‘Pump Up the Jam’ – Technotronic
