Happy Birthday Kate Winslet

I like to make lists. If you also find yourself compulsively fabricating lists of varying arbitrary things, then you will forgive me when I say that from maybe third grade on, I'd make lists of my favorite films, my favorite books, my favorite presidents. I'd make lists simply to make lists. It became an end in and of itself. One of the lists I would revise again and again over the years was my list of favorite actors (male). When I was in third grade, I loved The Fugitive (1993). My exclusive enthusiasm for The Fugitive replaced the previous champion of my enthusiasm, Indiana Jones and my #1 favorite actor, Harrison Ford, lost the title to Tommy Lee Jones. This list fluctuated every year, and Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Tommy Lee Jones, Harrison Ford, Ian McShane (because of Jesus of Nazareth), Laurence Fishburne and Ben Kingsley (because of Searching for Bobby Fischer), Samuel L. Jackson (because of Jurassic Park) would rotate around and around; Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro would be added, as would Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, and Gary Oldman. Sometimes when sharing this list with my parents, my mother would ask, "Do you have any favorite actresses?" And I didn't have an answer. It simply hadn't occured to me to pay attention to them. As a third, fourth, and fifth grader, my rudimentary appreciation of the dramatis personae was restricted to the men I idolized. The actresses were an afterthought, overshadowed.

I continued to make lists. Eventually I did make a list of Favorite Actresses, but it was only populated by 4 or 5 names, whereas my Favorite Actor list had 40, 50 names. Even to me this moment sounds woefully tardy in arriving, but it was not until 2006, yes 2006, that I finally witnessed a female character that could hold the same platonic fascination for me as the most riveting male cinematic characters. The character's name was, I believe, Sarah, from Todd Field's second film Little Children, and she was played by Kate Winslet, who I had seen in Titanic and a couple other things. But it was not that Kate Winslet was devoid of the same fascinating attributes that held me with this particular character in those other performances where I had watched her without sitting upright; they were there, only casting her in the very suitable role of a former academic (Sarah, we learn, had been working on a doctorate in English when she had to postpone it for wifedom and motherhood) had crystallized them: a woman of profound character, containing universes of substance, highly intelligent without being peculiar, carrying an intrinsic wholesomeness and decency even when being degraded or complicit in prurience.

These are the same qualities I see in my other favorite actresses: you see it in Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Emily Watson. You see it in young Helen Mirren and now. You see it in Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau. Substance. Before lust, there is admiration, sympathy, identification. If the first inclination upon seeing an actress is lust, then you have not properly seen her soul, seen her as a person. She is nothing more than a base stimulus - I lust after vapid ciphers as much as the next guy, Megan Fox for example, but lust is the first and only reaction I have towards her, as she shows very little evidence of having what could be considered "a soul." Think about this: Jessica Alba, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jessica Simpson, Jessica Biel, Olivia Wilde, Charisma Carpenter, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Malin Akerman, Elisha Cuthbert, Evangeline Lilly, Elisha Dushku, Alyssa Milano. These women, some of them even peers of Kate Winslet, are totally interchangeable: generic starlets.

So for a young actress to distinguish herself even slightly is a rather difficult task. That is another reason why all of those women previously mentioned blend together: they all seem young. Kate Winslet (who turns 33 today), like Cate Blanchett (39), has a personality that seems decades older than the youthful age where she resides. I think such individuals are referred to as "Old Souls."


The one role she is most celebrated for is one that I think is sort of unflattering to this conception I have of her: her performance as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). She is great in it, but Clementine is a child compared to Sarah in Little Children or Ophelia in Hamlet or Maddy in Quills. Clementine is short-sighted, irrational, quick-tempered, immature, vindictive. She is also often adorable, as when she digs through her purse while slunk on a seat on the train after being exasperated by Joel's (Jim Carrey) repeating of the word "nice." I'm not saying Clementine is a bad character; quite the contrary - that's the way the character must be for the good of the film. But someone who sees her as Clementine and is not acquainted with the rest of Winslet's body of work will have no impression of the elegance and maturity so crucial to the power and gravity of her presence onscreen.