Kate Elizabeth Winslet, CBE (born 5 October 1975),^[1] is an English actress and singer. She is the recipient of an Academy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Award and a Grammy Award. She is the youngest person to acquire six Academy Award nominations, and is one of the few actresses to win three of the four major American entertainment awards (EGOT).^[2][3] In addition, she has won awards from the Screen Actors Guild, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association among others, and an Honorary César Award in 2012.

Brought up in Berkshire, Winslet studied drama from childhood, and began her career in British television in 1991. She made her film debut in Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which she received praise. She garnered recognition for her supporting role in Sense and Sensibility (1995) before achieving global stardom with the epic romance Titanic (1997), which was the highest-grossing film of all time at that point.^[4] Winslet's performances in Iris (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Little Children (2006), and Revolutionary Road (2008) continued to draw praise from film critics; her performance in the last of these prompted the critic David Edelstein to describe her as "the best English-speaking film actress of her generation".^[5] She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in The Reader (2008) and the Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Miniseries for portraying the title role in Mildred Pierce (2011). Winslet's greatest commercial successes have been the romantic comedy The Holiday (2006), the animated film Flushed Away (2006), and the science fiction film Divergent (2014).

In addition to acting, Winslet has narrated documentaries and children's books. She was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children in 2000 for narrating Listen To the Storyteller. She has also provided her vocals to soundtracks of her films, the most popular of which is the single "What If" from Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001).^[6] Divorced from the film directors Jim Threapleton and Sam Mendes, Winslet is now married to the businessman Ned Rocknro

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was met with overwhelming acclaim, earning a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 93%, making it the second most acclaimed Jim Carrey film, after The Truman Show. Winslet's and Carrey's performances was generally praised. Roger Ebert commented, "Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that's what makes it work."^[3] Ebert later included the film in his "Great Movies" series.^[4] Similarly, A. O. Scott of The New York Times praised the film for being "cerebral, formally and conceptually complicated, dense with literary allusions and as unabashedly romantic as any movie you’ll ever see."^[5]

Time Out summed up their review by saying, "the formidable Gondry/Kaufman/Carrey axis works marvel after marvel in expressing the bewildering beauty and existential horror of being trapped inside one's own addled mind, and in allegorising the self-preserving amnesia of a broken but hopeful heart."^[6]

In 2006, in issue 201 of Empire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was voted #83 in their 201 Greatest Movies of All Time poll as voted for by readers. That same year, Winslet's performance as Clementine was included in Premiere magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time at #81. Claudia Puig, reviewer in USA Today said about her performance that "Winslet is wonderful as a free spirit whose hair color changes along with her moods. She hasn't had such a meaty role in a while, and she plays it just right."^[7]

Carol Vernallis points out that Gondry's experience in directing music videos contributed to the film's mise-en-scène and sound design. Vernallis describes some threads of the visual, aural and musical motifs throughout the film, and how some motifs can work in counterpoint.^[8]

In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the third-best of the decade