Winslet appeared on the British stage in productions such as Adrian Mole and Peter Pan and had a recurring role on the British sitcom Get Back before landing her debut film role, in Heavenly Creatures (1994), directed by Peter Jackson. In the film, Winslet played Juliet Hulme, a schoolgirl with tuberculosis whose obsessive friendship with a classmate leads the two girls to murder the classmate's mother in order to avoid separation.
Winslet attracted even more attention with her next role, as the winsome Marianne Dashwood in Ang Lee's film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1995), costarring Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman. As the "sensibility" of the movie,
Winslet earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. After several similarly high-brow roles, in such features as Jude (1995, based on the Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure) and as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996),
Winslet landed squarely on the A-list of leading ladies with her performance as Rose DeWitt, the heroine of James Cameron's record-breaking blockbuster Titanic.
The film won numerous Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and launched costar Leonardo DiCaprio to heartthrob status.
Winslet scored her second Academy Award nomination for acting, this time for Best Actress. (Her costar, Gloria Stuart, earned a nod in the supporting category for her portrayal of the older Rose DeWitt; the two actresses became the first ever to earn nominations for playing the same character.)
On the heels of her first Titanic hit, Winslet made two somewhat unlikely choices for her next projects: Hideous Kinky (1999), in which she played a free-spirited single mother who brings her two daughters along on a spiritual quest to Marrakech; and Holy Smoke (also 1999), the Jane Campion-directed film about a young woman who joins a religious cult.
The film's frank depiction of the sexual connection between Winslet and Harvey Keitel (as a man hired by the woman's family to "deprogram" her) displayed Winslet's unselfconsciousness and her talent for portraying physical and emotional nudity onscreen.
Winslet's next film was no less daring, as she returned to period drama with Quills, about the incarceration of the notorious French novelist the Marquis de Sade in the mental asylum of Charenton.
As the laundress who helps de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) smuggle his illicit writings out of the asylum for publication,
Winslet becomes the object of sexual obsession for the asylum's inmates, as well as the priest who is in charge, played by Joaquin Phoenix.