The Academy Award for Best Actress goes to Kate Winslet for her performance as Hanna in ‘The Reader.’ See photos and video and read more below.
Winslet, 33, was nominated five times in the past 13 years for the best actress Academy Award, but never won. Her best actress Oscar can be added to her two Golden Globes, a Screen Actors Guild award, a British BAFTA that Winslet has won this year.
Winslet was presented the award by Halle Berry, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren, and Shirley MacLaine, five previous Oscar winners in that category.
“To the academy, thank you so much,” she said after accepting her award. Winslet gave credit to her fellow best actress nominees: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, and Melissa Leo calling them “goddesses.”
Winslet told the Academy Award audience she would be lying if she said she hadn’t practiced an Oscar acceptance speech before:
“I think I was probably 8 years old and staring into the bathroom mirror, and this would have been a shampoo bottle,” she said gesturing to her golden statuette. “Well, it’s not a shampoo bottle now!”
Portraying Hanna Schmitz, a former Nazi prison guard who embarks on an affair with a teen-age boy more than a decade later, was the most challenging role Winslet had ever played. She told Reuters in a recent interview:
“Just getting underneath the skin of such a complex person who had lived such an isolated life for so many different reasons, it was hard and quite lonely at times.”
In addition to Winslet’s academy-award winning performance in ‘The Reader,’ she also won critical acclaim for her performance with co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, “Revolutionary Road.” The two films were released only weeks apart.
Photos: Wenn.com