WHY IS LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND KATE WINSLET'S FRIENDSHIP SO IMPORTANT?
They met on Titanic and almost 20 years later they maintain one of the most beautiful love stories in Hollywood: one of friendship.
The filming of Titanic lasted seven months, almost as long as a school year. And Kate and Leonardo became close. In an interview with Oprah in 1998 Kate confessed that before filming she was scared. "How am I going to be able to work with such a handsome man?"
In When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron devoted two of the funniest and most ingenious hours in cinema in decades to prove that a man and a woman cannot be friends, that whenever the relationship grows, one of the two - in the best of cases, both - he would end up falling in love with the other and the friendship would be frustrated.
7 years after we saw Harry and Sally kiss on New Years Eve, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet knew each other. Together they shot the highest grossing and award-winning love story in movie history. And they couldn't be more different.
Leonardo DiCaprio had already gotten his first Oscar nomination for Who Does Gilbert Grape Loves, but - and despite the fact that Titanic would be the movie that elevated him to the posters of teenage rooms around the world - then he was eminently a carpenter idol. We met him in Problems Grow and we had seen him in such disparate roles - for being benevolent - as Critters 3 and Quick and Dead, but two films marked his transition from "how cute is this boy" to "what cute is this boy", where the difference between the two sentences is the intonation caused by hormones in the latter case. Diary of a rebel introduced us to a high school boy as handsome as he was self-destructive, who was able to get high with the cleaning products he found and masturbate on screen with the same joy ("Time flies when you are young and you masturbate") to rejoicing of more than one spectator. Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet turned that tormented and cynical boy into a tragic hero in armor and disco music. The girls of half the world already had their fantasy composition of place made: the baddie was also capable of dying for love.
Kate Winslet circa 1997 was not listed in anyone's folders. His career started on British television in the early nineties and he made the leap to cinema with Celestial Creatures, Peter Jackson's fourth film that, in a total change of register for the director, told the tragedy of two girls who fell in love in the New Zealand of the 50s. Kate dared with a theme and a (real) story of those that can elevate you or can ruin your career. And it worked out well. Or at least well enough because although the film was not a success, it opened the doors to his next works, all adaptations of works by classical authors in the English language: Mark Twain (Adventures in King Arthur's Court), Shakespeare (the Hamlet by Kenneth Branagh), Thomas Hardy (Jude) and Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility). It is precisely to Ang Lee's adaptation of Austen's novel that Kate owes her first Oscar nomination as a supporting actress, the one that proved that Winslet had come to the cinema to stay.
These are the credentials of Leonardo and Kate before meeting that although in terms of filmography and recognition (both nominations) they could be similar, in terms of the status they had been conferred they could not be more different. Leonardo DiCaprio was the guy with whom half the world wouldn't mind having died inside the Titanic if it meant spending a night with him in a car beforehand. Kate Winslet was that weird friend who profiles her lips in brown and memorizes Shakespeare while probably listening to New Order on her walkman. The handsome guy from high school and the freak. They were destined to dislike each other, not understand each other, or, at best, be indifferent to each other. Nothing is further from what happened.
The filming of Titanic lasted seven months, almost as long as a school year. And Kate and Leonardo became close. In an interview with Oprah in 1998 Kate confessed that before filming she was scared. "How am I going to be able to work with such a handsome man?" But - she continues - when she met her, she discovered that she was a normal guy, which is probably the biggest compliment a guy like DiCaprio can get. "We laughed a lot, we had a complicity of brothers, we hit it off right away." If at the beginning of the shoot she was overwhelmed by his beauty, when he finished Titanic, for her DiCaprio was, you and as she told Vanity Fair, the stinking Leo.
In 2004, also on the Oprah show, a teenager in the audience asked DiCaprio which kiss (film) she remembered most fondly. Leonardo hesitates a few seconds of courtesy to later settle: Kate Winslet. It is explained immediately after: "We had to repeat it more times than anyone can imagine." Then Oprah gives the actor images of Kate Winslet talking about him and an excited Leonardo responds: “that's my girl. I feel absolutely the same as her. If it hadn't been for her, that movie wouldn't have come out. "
At this point, after coming from such different worlds, becoming intimate in a shoot that also required romantic complicity and that would end up becoming the film that marked the end of the 20th century as much as their careers, surely Nora Ephron would have had many things to say about the relationship between Leonardo and Kate Winslet. They, however, were to other things.
The careers of the two actors took very different directions after Titanic, in the same way that they had before the James Cameron film. It took him years to get rid of that teenage idol sanbenito that so many movie critics use to delegitimize actors for the simple fact that girls like them. It wasn't until he met the true love of his life, Martin Scorsese, and starred in Gangs of New York, that many viewers began to surrender to the evidence: what if the actor who had been denied by the academy by denying him the nomination for the most successful film? nominated to date was good? 15 years later, due to those invisible mechanisms that dominate public opinion, even the last neighbor of the most remote town in the Pyrenees is clamoring for Leonardo's Oscar and in Madrid this call has been organized in the Plaza de Colón, in the event that I win.
If Leonardo DiCaprio has had to overcome the teenage idol sanbenito, Kate Winslet had to overcome a barrier that makes his partner's seem a trifle. As she confessed the other day in her speech at the Baftas, at age 14 an acting teacher told one of the best actresses of the last 20 years that she would do well in the profession if she settled for playing fat roles ("Look at me now!" Kate replied proving once more that the best revenge is success). That woman, who surely now wants to take advantage of the witness protection program, was right in the diagnosis of reality (if you are fat and want to be an actress, you have it much more difficult than the rest) and perhaps that is why Kate He began his career so focused on period characters where his physique was much more in line with the current canon, but he failed in the fundamental question: talent and perseverance, if they are as indisputable as Winslet's, end up imposing themselves on everything.
After Titanic she continued alternating classics in the purest British tradition (Quills) with a series of films (Holly smoke, Forget about me) that made her a representative of one of the highest risk professions in the film industry: the of indie muse. And not only did she come out unscathed, but she was able to combine them with many other more conventional projects that would bring her closer to a larger audience such as Iris, The Life of David Gale or Never Never Discovery. And titles more difficult to classify as Secret Games. An eclectic career that earned her six nominations until she was finally awarded an Oscar (certainly not the last) as lead actress for The Reader the same year that he reunited her on screen with Leonardo.
Revolutionary road was the reunion of our two protagonists. More than ten years after he sank and she was saved on a too large board, Kate and Leonardo shared a screen under the orders of Sam Mendes, at that time - in case Nora Ephron had doubts again - Winslet's husband. And if Titanic inflamed the most sensitive souls, Mendes' film taught us that you have to be careful with what you dream not only because it can come true, but because the frustration of not being fulfilled can ruin your life. In addition, he left us to remember one of the most terrifying bloodstains (for being close and plausible) in cinema in recent years.
“For one of the most special men in my life. Leo, I am so happy that I cannot be here and not tell you how much I love you and how much I have loved you in the last 14 years ”. These were some of the words of Kate when collecting her Golden Globe for Revolutionary Road. He replied by blowing her a kiss from the audience. And Oprah, who seems to have a monopoly on the relationship between the two, once again witnessed another declaration of love, this time from Leo to Kate. “Congratulations, Kate, I still hadn't had the chance to tell you in public, you have done an incredible job, you won two (Golden Globes) in one night (the other for The Reader) and you deserve it for having done two such extraordinary jobs ”. She then kissed him back. “We have grown together in this industry and we have become an essential support mechanism for each other”, he commented and added “for me it was very important to see her collect those two Golden Globes because to date she is one of the actresses more nominees with fewer awards ”.
These last words of Leo today we could put in the mouth of Kate. That is why it is so important for her to be present when DiCaprio presumably picks up his Oscar on February 28, (will they double and will Kate get the Oscar from Alicia Vikander?). For all this, we have not stopped seeing signs of affection towards each other in all these years. Because their relationship - may Nora Ephron forgive me - is prettier and more hopeful than most: because it shows us, once again, that a man and a woman can love and support each other without the need for their love story to end in a kiss ( or in divorce).
