Best Actress: Kate Winslet's Moment

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Kate Winslet

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Winslet won her point, but that's about as diva-ish as she gets. The kind of behavior that could get her called a movie star spooks her; she started running away from the label in 1998, desperate to escape Titanic mania, and if it's gaining on her, she doesn't want to know. "For her, it reflects a lifestyle she doesn't aspire to," says Mendes. "And also, if you call yourself a movie star, the next movie you're in will probably prove that you're not." Movie stars have projects built around them; Winslet seeks out movies in which she can serve a director or story by becoming an essential support beam in the film's overall architecture. Movie stars usually want more — more words, more screen time, more veto power; she wants less. When the playwright and screenwriter Doug Wright worked with her on Quills in 2000, he recalls, Winslet told him "with great tact, 'Doug, I'd never say a word against your writing, but this line? This one here? ... I don't have to say it. I can do it with my eyes.' It was the best lesson in screenwriting I've ever been given."

More than any of her peers, Winslet can shape her greatest moments within those silences. In The Reader, she bares her character in the piercing looks of lust, suspicion, self-loathing and judgment that Hanna directs at her young lover and in her terrible stares of incomprehension during her trial. And Revolutionary Road pivots on the scene in which April, sitting on the beach next to her husband, realizes that he is never going to keep his promise that they'll move to Paris — that he will always ultimately fail her. It's a shattering realization that Winslet conveys not only mutely but behind dark glasses. (See pictures of people who were nominated for leading and supporting Oscars in the same year.)

"I kept saying, 'Sam, should she really be wearing the glasses? Shouldn't I just prop them on the top of my head?' And he said, 'Absolutely not!' So I thought, Well, I trust him completely, and this is a whole new challenge — someone has taken my eyes away. But the silences are where I have learned the most about the job that I do. They're where I learn to think."

Winslet's pre-Titanic breakthrough came when she was still in her teens, in 1995's charming Sense and Sensibility. But beginning with her portrayal of Clementine, the psychedelic-haired femme semi-fatale who radiates crazy in 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a darker, richer phase of her career began to bloom. With the 2006 drama Little Children, in which she plays a suburban mom whose fear that she is becoming a cliché propels her into an affair, and her two latest movies, her appetite for a certain kind of role — "angst-ridden women," she says, owning up to it immediately — has become unmistakable. "In her real life, she likes to keep things very simple," says Mendes. "But she's drawn to roles that seem like puzzles that need to be explored or mazes that need to be entered, even if she doesn't know how to get out." (See the top 10 movies of 2008.)

Winslet's attraction to those roles is something of a mystery even to her. "It's a funny thing," she says. For a few seconds, her articulate, free-associative, appealingly profane conversational style deserts her. "I almost ... don't know. If I had a therapist, I'm sure they would identify it. Clearly, it's not coincidental. Do I feel trapped? No, not at all. Have I experienced feelings of serious entrapment in my life? Absolutely, yes, without question — and I haven't known that I was trapped until it's all come crashing down. And only then have I realized that there's a fire in me that won't be put out, and, my God, I can't believe I just said that! What a wankyactor thing to say!" She sits back, unwraps a pouch of tobacco and rolls a cigarette, a habit she says she'll work on shedding after the Oscars. "I think what connects these characters is that they want to have clarity — not necessarily freedom, just the chance to take a moment and say, 'Now what do I do?' "

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