Winslet could finally be a winner at tonight’s Golden Globes, but are her ‘downbeat’ roles what America wants to see? Guy Adams reports from Los Angeles.

Is this Kate Winslet’s year? The actress has received five Oscar nominations and five Golden Globe nominations to date, but never won. In a pincer movement that might see her break her duck, she is up for awards in two separate categories at tonight’s Globes ceremony.

She is the lead actress in both the fifties US suburbs tragi-drama Revolutionary Road, directed by her husband Sam Mendes, and Stephen Daldry’s Nazi-themed The Reader. To double her chances of success, she is nominated in the best supporting role for the latter.

The question is: will judges steer clear of celebrating such downbeat films, when the cinema-goers and TV audiences show signs of rejecting what they see as “worthy” themes?

Continue reading Golden Globes: Kate’s blonde ambition

Kate Winslet has finally become that rare thing: the female celebrity we all genuinely get.

Already one thing is clear: 2009 is going to be Kate Winslet year. This month, she has not one but two films out — Revolutionary Road and The Reader — that have already earned her a pair of Golden Globe nominations. But her extraordinary performances (and, in The Reader, she will take your breath away) are only part of the reason Winslet is having her big moment. She has finally become that rare thing: the female celebrity we all genuinely get. It’s partly that, at 33, she is now in her prime; it’s partly about our expectations (we’ve changed, too); and it’s a lot to do with timing. Women-we-all-get don’t come along that often, because they have to tick all the right boxes and chime with the zeitgeist. Now, for the first time since, oooh, Princess Diana in the mid-1990s, perhaps, KW happens to have hit the spot. Here’s why:

Continue reading Why we love Kate Winslet