Titanic might have catapulted Kate Winslet to widespread fame, but fans often remember a different film role first.
“People come up to me in the streets more about The Holiday and the episode of Extras that I did than Titanic, I promise you,” Winslet, 48, said during the Wednesday, February 28, episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “Especially at Christmas.”
She continued, “What’s so lovely is that mothers and daughters come up to me in the grocery store and they say, ‘OK, we just love The Holiday. It’s our little ritual at Christmas.’ And they have things that they eat every year. They sit down, it’s a tradition, and I just love that. That’s something I never would have expected, this sort of mother-daughter connection around a film like that. It’s so nice. It’s lovely.”
Winslet played Iris in Nancy Meyers’ 2006 romantic comedy, starring opposite Cameron Diaz, Jude Law and Jack Black. In the film, Winslet’s Iris swaps homes with Diaz’s Amanda over the winter holidays, traveling to Los Angeles.
“Well, I think relationships will be eternally fascinating to people, you know,” Winslet previously told Collider in 2006 of starring in The Holiday. “I do really feel this is a great date movie precisely because it is about relationships and it’s about men and women’s struggle with their emotions and heartbreak and looking for the one and I think we’re all doing that, at some point in our lives are looking for that special person. It can be very, very hard to find in the struggle that you go through emotionally and trying to find that person is something that I think will always be fascinating to audiences.”
Nine years earlier, Winslet starred as Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic. The film, directed by James Cameron, chronicled a fictional love story between Rose and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) aboard the Titanic ship ahead of its infamous sinking when it crashed into an iceberg. Titanic gave Winslet widespread acclaim and her second Oscar nomination. (She was previously nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1995’s Sense and Sensibility.)
“I felt like I had to look a certain way, or be a certain thing,” the English actress told Net-a-Porter’s Porter magazine in a profile published earlier this month, reflecting on the years after Titanic made her a global star. “And because media intrusion was so significant at that time, my life was quite unpleasant.”
Winslet continued: “Journalists would always say, ‘After Titanic, you could have done anything and yet you chose to do these small things’… and I was like, ‘Yeah, you bet your f–kin’ life I did! Because, guess what, being famous was horrible.’ I was grateful, of course. I was in my early 20s, and I was able to get a flat. But I didn’t want to be followed literally feeding the ducks.”
