Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Winslet: Oscar double in ‘Reader,’ ‘Road’?

When it comes to Oscars, the whole world is saying: “Why hasn’t Kate Winslet won one?”

Well, maybe not quite. But that was the deliberately pompous lament of the “Titanic” star when she played herself as a blatant awards-craver on HBO’s “Extras.”

In all seriousness, she could have two chances at an Academy Award this season: for her supporting role as a woman hiding a secret in “The Reader” (Dec. 10) and for her lead role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in “Revolutionary Road” (Dec. 26).

“I’m so lucky to play both of these women in my lifetime, let alone in less than a year,” Winslet says. “It doesn’t even add up that one person should have gotten to play both of these parts. It truly rocks my world.”

“The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), was scheduled for 2009 but was pushed up after a public battle between producers Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein. But the date shift never bothered Winslet. “I’m never involved, as an actor, with the release date of a movie,” she says. “It’s not my job. My job is just to play a character and be professional and do that job with a whole heart and to the best of my ability.”

The two films, she stresses, “couldn’t be any more different.” In “The Reader,” set in post-World War II Germany, she plays Hanna Schmitz, who falls in love with a teen boy who reads books to her, all the while hiding secrets about her past. Ralph Fiennes plays the boy as an adult.

“At the beginning of the story, I am my age, and at the end, I am 68,” the 33-year-old says. “So I age 35 years in the course of the story. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding her. It’s very difficult for me to talk about without giving the story away. It’s like “The Sixth Sense” or “The Crying Game,” one of those where you go, “Oh, no, no, no, don’t tell me.”

In “Revolutionary Road,” based on a novel by Richard Yates, she and DiCaprio play April and Frank Wheeler, a suburban couple in the late 1950s whose marriage is struggling under the weight of unfulfilled dreams. Directed by her husband, Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”), it began generating attention as soon as it was announced: It reunites her and DiCaprio on-screen for the first time since 1997’s “Titanic,” the highest-grossing film in history.

“We are very aware there will be a certain amount of expectation: Leo and I together. That’s just a thing, a big old thing,” Winslet says. “If it means more people will be prone to see this film, then great. But our hope is people will be able to fall in love with Frank and April in the same way they fell for Jack and Rose.”