Kate Winslet's Oscar Sunshine
It's 12 days until the Academy Awards, but Oscar nominee Kate Winslet is positively counting the minutes until her limo pulls up outside Hollywood's Kodak Theater. Though thrice nominated before — for Sense and Sensibility, Titanic and Iris — she's as giddy as an awards-season rookie this year, thanks to her best-actress nod for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
"It feels absolutely fantastic," Winslet says. "Just getting the part of Clementine was such a fight. I was so determined. I loved this character so much, and was always so amazed that [director]
Michel Gondry saw beyond the period pieces and the corsets and gave me this opportunity. To be remembered for [
Sunshine], since it came out so long ago — I could not be happier and more overwhelmed by that.
"Look, I've always been so amazed to get a job," the 29-year-old Brit adds candidly. "To be nominated in the company of these women is amazing. I've been nominated in the past... but particularly this year, because Clementine was so hard for me and meant so much, it feels like the first time I've ever been nominated. It's an amazing feeling."
Playing Clementine Kruczynski — a kooky gal who fights the post-breakup blues by having ex-boyfriend
Jim Carrey erased from her memory — was indeed a stretch for Winslet. And not just 'cause she traded her typical period-film glamour for magenta hair and grunge wear.
"Most of the work I did was on that [American] accent," she shares, "because that would be my giveaway if I slipped up." However, she says nailing Clem's appealingly nutty personality was even tougher. "It would've been easy to have made [the character] incredibly brash, really out there and so in your face. [But] when you're playing someone who's
that neurotic and eccentric, the combination of emotions can become incredibly irritating. I didn't want her to irritate the audience. I wanted them to empathize with her and love her for all her kookiness. Finding that balance was hard."
Hey, Kate, that's why the Academy nominated
you for a golden boy statue and not
Andy Dick.
