Credit: Far Out / Andrea Raffin
As soon as her career looked set to take off, Kate Winslet thought the whole acting gig was scuppered as soon as it started.
She only counted one role under her belt. Aside from a handful of TV credits, the 17-year-old Winslet won her feature debut in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, the 1994 crime drama exploring New Zealand’s Parker–Hulme murder case. She wowed the critics, flexing an intense performance as the fantasist Juliet Hulme, lost in the obsessive friendship with Melanie Lynskey’s Pauline Parker, as they plan the murder of the latter’s mother.
Meaty stuff for a teenager. Such plaudits led Winslet to her real big break, bagging a role in Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Thompson was impressed, upgrading Winslet from the minor Lucy Steele role up to passionate and idealistic Marianne Dashwood, the “Sensibility” to Thompson’s elder sister Elinor’s “Sense” of emotional restraint and adherence to the strict mores of the late 18th century.
It was a major coup for the young Winslet. However, disaster would strike early on in the shoot. New to Western audiences, the Sense and Sensibility team managed to recruit Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee to direct the picture. Some anxieties were had by both parties, chiefly around Lee’s lack of familiarity with Austen’s material. Yet, he understood how to glean the comedy from family dynamics, as well as professing to understand “the essence of social repression against free will” owing to Taiwan’s comparable class structures, as he told New York.
He threw himself into the world, reportedly requiring Winslet to read Gothic literature and play the piano to further enter the head of Dashwood. A clash of personalities on set struck Winslet with a terrible pang of insecurity, however.
“Oh my god, I will never forget it,” she recalled dramatically on 2024’s How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast.
Supposedly, the gregarious mood among the cast stood at odds with Lee’s quiet, reserved character and directing style. A difficult character to read, Winslet eventually managed to pluck up the confidence to ask how her performance had been at the end of the day. A lot was running through her mind. Lee initially wanted another role for Winslet, bagging the Marianne part on the strength of one script read and Thompson and the producer Lindsay Doran’s support. Spiralling in a prang of self-doubt, Winslet approached Lee and made her inquiry.
“I went to Ang, and he’d said nothing to me, and I thought, ‘I’m just gonna ask you know?’” Winslet recalled. “I said, ‘So was everything OK?’ And he looked at me with a smile, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he went, ‘Oh, you’ll get better, I promise you.’ And I was like, ‘OK, yeah right, that’s told me,’ went to the trailer, and burst into tears.”
A cultural clash, perhaps? Whether intended or otherwise, it’s a brutal quip to make on a young actor, clearly a bag of nerves on her first mammoth production. Supposedly, upon Thompson’s hearing, the writer and co-star were ready to confront Lee about his uncaring quip. Winslet would soon get over it, winning the romantic lead in Titanic two years later and being catapulted to Hollywood megastardom.
Lee’s faux pas was bested by Woody Allen, however, who, Winslet revealed on the podcast, had instructed her to “do it better, you’re just doing it like a bad actress” on the set of 2017’s Wonder Wheel.
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