Word: actressing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course, Winslet would rather be acting onscreen, which is, she says, "the one thing that I do for myself" - and lately the thing she has been doing better than just about anyone else. In an industry that insists that most actresses remain giggly, pliable and princessy well into middle age, Winslet has somehow avoided that pigeonhole entirely. She doesn't play girls; she never really has. She plays women. Unsentimentalized, restless, troubled, discontented, disconcerted, difficult women. And clearly, it's working for her. Her two most recent performances - as Hanna Schmitz, the illiterate former concentration-camp guard in The Reader...
...Winslet has become not only the finest actress of her generation but in many ways also the perfect actress for this moment. She's intense without being humorless. She's international in outlook (though raised in Reading, England, in a middle-class family of working actors, she now lives in New York City and won those Oscar nominations for playing three Americans, two Brits and a German). She's ambitious but cheerfully self-deflating, capable of glamour but also expressive of a kind of jolting common sense. She has a strong professional ethic, which she somehow balances with her domestic...
That seems a reasonable reaction for someone who has spent the decade since the historic success of Titanic making sure she's an actress first and a celebrity only when useful; the YouTube universe, in which every utterance is rewound, scrutinized and parsed, is new to her. When she succumbed to some teary emotionalism at the Globes, the Times of London called her acceptance speech a "disaster" and warned direly that her exuberance was insensitive to the "darker, crueller" mood of an America in economic collapse. Try processing critiques like that while smiling warmly on camera as Oprah Winfrey tells...
...granted that I was ready, and he said, 'I can't talk about it 24 hours a day.' And I just lost it. I said, 'I'm sorry, but you're gonna have to. You're my director, and if I wasn't playing April and the actress playing April phoned you, you'd leave your dinner to go cold and take that call for two hours in the other room! I know you would because I saw you do it with Jake Gyllenhaal!' " she says, recalling Jarhead and laughing as she re-creates her mini-tantrum...
...skilled enough," Winslet says. The nudity required for the film's sex scenes didn't unsettle her - though she now says, "I think I won't do it again: a) I can't keep getting away with it, and b) I don't want to become 'that actress who always gets her kit off.' " But she wondered if she could handle a German accent, play Hanna convincingly into old age and find a foothold in a character who exemplifies the banality of evil. "You don't have to make the audience like you. And not worrying about that makes...