Kate Winslet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Winslet
All of this info can be found via the link above! :)
Kate Elizabeth Winslet was born on Oct. 5, 1975, in Reading, Berkshire, England. She is an English-born actress and occasional singer. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the 2008 movie The Reader. She has won awards from the Screen Actors Guild, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Hollywood Foreign Press Association. She can do drama, comedy, period, contemporary. She recieved somewhat large recognition for her role as one of the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility.

She's also one of my biggest favorite actresses!!

Raised in Berkshire, she studied drama since she was young. Her 2 biggest movie successes have been Flushed Away in 2006, where she did the voice of a rat named Rita, and The Holiday in 2006, where her character switches places with Cameron Diaz's character.

She got her start on TV, on the BBC show Dark Season. Her first movie role was in the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures, where she won the role over 175 girls to play Juliet Hulme, who helps in the murder of hte mother of her best friend, Pauline Parker(Melanie Lynskey). Winslet noted: "With Heavenly Creatures, all I knew I had to do was completely become that person. In a way it was quite nice doing [the film] and not knowing a bloody thing." Never knew she talked like that, lol!

The following year, she auditioned for the role of Lucy Steele in the movie based on Jane Austen's book Sense and Sensibility. This movie also starred Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman. She instead got the role of Marianne Dashwood. In order to prepare for the role, she had to read Austen-era Gothic novels and poetry, and learn to play the piano to make herself graceful. Director Ang Lee was worried about her getting a little too into the role, so he suggested that she learn tai chi.

In 1997, she starred in the James Cameron movie Titanic, about the ill-fated cruise ship. In the movie, she was to play shy, sensitive 17 year Rose DeWitt-Bukater, a socialite who survives the sinking of the RMS Titanic. In 2004, she starred alongside Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, based on the life of J.M. Barrie, the man behind the story of Peter Pan. Her role was as Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, whose sons inspired Barrie to write Peter Pan.

In 2006, she starred alongside Cameron Diaz, Jude Law and Jack Black in The Holiday. In this movie, she plays Iris Simpkins, a society column editor for London-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who switches households with Amanda Woods(Cameron Diaz), a workaholic whose company makes movie trailers in L.A. And that same year, she starred in the movie Flushed Away, where she provides the voice of Rita, a sewer scavenging rat who helps Roddy St. James(Hugh Jackman) escape Ratropolis and get back to 'Uptop' as they call it, or Kensington.

On Nov. 22, 1998, she met Jim Threapleton, who she met on the set of the movie Hideous Kinky. They both have a daughter, Mia Honey Threapleton. They divorced on Dec. 13, 2001. After that, she began seeing director Sam Mendes. And shortly after, they married, and had a son, named Joe Alfie Winslet.

She now runs a charity called The Golden Hat, which eliminates barriers for people with autism.