Kate Winslet's 20 best performances – ranked!

20. The Dressmaker (2015)

Points for ambition as Kate Winslet joined the comeback effort of Australian director Jocelyn “Proof” Moorhouse, who had not released a film since the mid-90s. Winslet plays a star dressmaker on a gruesome revenge trip back to the outback town where she grew up. Tonally, The Dressmaker is all over the place, but Winslet is game.

19. Contagion (2011)

Winslet plays an Epidemic Intelligence Service agent – of all the most horribly relevant things – in Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller that everyone is now digging out of the DVD crate. Winslet puts up a decent show in a big-name ensemble cast, but her role is necessarily small.

18. Iris (2001)

Richard Eyre’s biopic of Iris Murdoch was dominated by the heartrending rapport between Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent as the author and her husband as dementia took over their relationship. Winslet was cast as Dench’s younger counterpart, a free-spirited student bicycling around Oxford – a role she could do in her sleep.

17. Enigma (2001)

A solid wartime thriller – now somewhat overshadowed by The Imitation Game – adapted from Robert Harris’s novel about the activities of the Bletchley Park codebreakers. Winslet, in intellectual Coke-bottle specs, helps lovelorn Dougray Scott track down missing glamourpuss Saffron Burrows; Winslet was starting to grow out of this sort of thing, but she gives a good account of herself.

16. Hamlet (1996)

One from the early, pre-Titanic days. As was once her wont, Winslet gives it both barrels as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s impressively mounted production: she is a screaming fury.

15. Quills (2000)

Winslet in one of her less glamorous parts: her washerwoman Madeleine, in the notorious Charenton hospital, catches the eye of the Marquis de Sade, confined there in his later years. It all looks a bit queasy now, and Winslet – strong as ever – has to contend with a slightly boring role.

14. Jude (1996)

Playing opposite Christopher Eccleston, Winslet lights up Michael Winterbottom’s sturdy Thomas Hardy adaptation as the flighty Sue Bridehead. Though perhaps a little callow compared to what came later, Winslet looks very good here, switching from mood to mood as the story demands.

13. Flushed Away (2006)

With a severely altered patina as a result of Aardman’s decision to ditch stop-motion for full CGI, this is, if we are being honest, the animation outfit’s least distinguished full-length film. It’s also their starriest, with Winslet joining Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen and Jean Reno for a middleweight sewer-bound yarn. Decent, without being spectacular.

12. Holy Smoke (1999)

Once she attained industry clout, Winslet always sought out major directorial names, so her connection with Jane Campion was something of a no-brainer. This once seemed a bit of an oddity in the Campion canon, an idiosyncratic change of pace after the high Hollywood literariness of Portrait of a Lady, with Winslet playing a guru-follower subjected to deprogramming by counsellor Harvey Keitel. Now, though, it looks a bit like a rehearsal for Top of the Lake.

11. Mildred Pierce (2011)

Winslet is not the type to spread herself too thinly, so the fashionable flood of event TV doesn’t figure much on her CV. This, though, must have been a can’t-refuse: the role made famous by Joan Crawford, with the impeccably stylish Todd “Far From Heaven” Haynes at the controls. Winslet won some of her best reviews for yet another essay in the defiantly unglamorous.

10. Little Children (2006)

Winslet evolved into a Hollywood heavyweight in the mid-2000s, and this ensemble drama – from another highly regarded awards-bait director, Todd Field – got her her third best actress Oscar nomination. She offered a finely detailed performance as an unhappily married woman who connects with an equally unhappily married dad (Patrick Wilson) in a John Cheever-esque study of suburban malaise and emotional immaturity.

9. Steve Jobs (2015)

Though the vast majority of the acting fireworks belong to Michael Fassbender in the title role (“charismatic maverick” turned up to 11), Winslet is excellent in the dressed-down, dark-wigged role of Joanna Hoffman, Apple marketing guru and provider of emotional content in this Aaron Sorkin-scripted, Danny Boyle-directed showpiece. Winslet got another Oscar nomination – for best supporting actress – which was well deserved; but she is a little under-served by the drama, where Hoffman is slightly boringly pigeonholed as the Voice of Conscience. She makes it work though.

8. Carnage (2011)

Winslet has gone on record saying she regrets working with Polanski (as well as Woody Allen), so it’s tricky to know how to take this now. Remove Polanski’s name from the equation and this looks like an actors’ showcase of high calibre (if a little self-consciously so). Winslet and her business-guy husband Christoph Waltz are meeting Jodie Foster and John C Reilly to talk over their sons’ fight; politeness soon turns to irritation and then flat-out rage. It’s another heavyweight turn for Winslet, another of the upscale American types she has got very good at.

7. Titanic (1997)

The big one. As Rose Dewitt Bukater, Winslet offers bit of a route one performance as a teenage socialite suffocated by a financially advantageous betrothal, liberated by contact with Leonardo DiCaprio’s roughneck artist. But in such an epic, go-for-the-throat popular spectacle, it was undoubtedly what was needed. (Cameron has said he originally wanted an Audrey Hepburn type, which Winslet fundamentally is not.) Oddly, DiCaprio seemed to do a little better out of Titanic’s planet-conquering success, almost immediately graduating to Spielberg and Scorsese pictures; it took Winslet a bit longer to crack the Hollywood elite.

6. Hideous Kinky (1998)

So what did Winslet do with her Titanic kudos? She went straight on to this adaptation of Esther Freud’s 70s-set novel about a spiritual-seeking woman who decamps to Morocco with her kids. Winslet’s free-spirit side was given full rein in what was her first solo lead; apart from anything else, she proved she could carry a film on her own – something that, strangely, she has not had much opportunity to do since.

5. The Reader (2008)

Winslet finally got her long-awaited best actress Oscar for this adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s acclaimed war-guilt novel. Directed by Stephen Daldry, written by David Hare, and co-starring Ralph Fiennes, it’s about as awards-baity as you can get – and that’s even before the Holocaust-themed subject matter. Winslet has the tricky task of making an empathetic character study out of a closed-off former death-camp guard: an impressive achievement, considering her naturally outgoing personality.

4. Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Winslet wasn’t a total unknown when she was cast in Peter Jackson’s remarkable true-crime drama: she had done Dark Secrets on TV and had a bit part in medical soap Casualty. But in this, her first full-length feature, she was a revelation as the affluent English teenager Juliet, who develops an obsessive relationship with put-upon working class New Zealander Pauline and ends in murder. Jackson’s deployment of then-pioneering visual effects to evoke the girls’ elaborate fantasy world is what makes the film stand out. But Winslet’s ability to infuse her complex character with an unshakeable naturalness put her on the map.

3. Sense and Sensibility (1995)

Winslet’s looks make her perfect for period material; that she has largely swerved crinoline-based roles is no doubt down to a wish not to be typecast. This early one, though, is really special; she plays the guileless, lovelorn Marianne Dashwood, getting over dashing Greg Wise to wind up with soberly intense Alan Rickman. One of those films where, serendipitously, absolutely everyone is at the top of their game (none more so than Emma Thompson, as writer-star), this was Winslet’s chance to prove she could hold her own with the big beasts of British acting.

2. Revolutionary Road (2008)

A prestige adaptation, directed by Winslet’s then-husband Sam Mendes and reuniting her with her Titanic confreres DiCaprio and Kathy Bates. Revolutionary Road’s status as a literary cult meant this film couldn’t have been more machine-tooled as an Oscar-contending film; the only surprise is that it only scored three nominations, and didn’t win any. Winslet, arguably, has the most powerful role, as a frustrated housewife in 1950s New England suburbia, in a troubled marriage and failing in an attempt at an acting career. Even more than Little Children, this showcased Winslet’s elevation to the Hollywood acting A-list: perfectly coiffed, beautifully dressed, and extracting every nuance possible from a given scene. Cate Blanchett-level stuff, in other words.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Winslet was still – just – in her scruffy, early-career mode when she made this mindbending fantasy opposite a cast-very-much-against-type Jim Carrey – although she was clearly savvy enough to align herself with top envelope-pushing talents Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman. Not many actors could have survived this Total Recall of romcoms with multiple hair-dye jobs, but Winslet successfully accesses her free-spirit locker once again (so much so that her Clementine is often cited as an early example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl phenomenon that blighted mid-2000s indie comedy). Be that as it may, Winslet is tremendously engaging here, and manages the time jumps and perspective shifts with aplomb. Perhaps most importantly, though, it showed she could do contemporary as effectively as period, giving her the chance to make inroads into modern-day drama and thereby cement her place in the big league. Plus, it’s just a great film.