Why is Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet's friendship so important?
They met in Titanic and almost 20 years later they have one of the most beautiful love stories in Hollywood: one of friendship.
In When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron devoted two of the funniest and most ingenious hours of cinema in recent decades to show that a man and a woman cannot be friends, that whenever the relationship becomes closer, one of the two – in the best of cases, both of them 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 Year's Eve, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet met. Together they filmed the highest-grossing and most awarded love story in the history of cinema. And they couldn't be more different.
Leonardo DiCaprio had already gotten his first Oscar nomination for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, but – and despite the fact that Titanic would be the film that elevated him to the posters of half the world's teenage rooms – then he was eminently a carpet idol. We met him in Growing Trouble and had seen him in such – to be benevolent – disparate roles as Critters 3 and Quick and Dead, but two films marked his transition from “how cute is this boy” to “how cute is this boy”, where the difference between the two sentences is the intonation caused by the 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 on cleaning products he found and masturbate on screen with equal glee (“Time flies when you're young and you masturbate”) to delight of more than one spectator. Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet turned that troubled, cynical boy into a tragic hero in armor and disco music. The girls of half the world already had their fanciful composition of the place made: ** the badass was also capable of dying for love.**
Kate Winslet circa 1997 didn't show up in anyone's folders. His career began on British television in the early nineties and he made the leap to cinema with Heavenly Creatures, the fourth film by Peter Jackson which, in a total change of record for the director, recounted 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 she turned out fine. Or at least well enough because although the film was not a success, it opened the doors to his next jobs, all adaptations of works by classic authors in the English language: Mark Twain (Adventures in the Court of King Arthur), Shakespeare (the Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet), Thomas Hardy (Jude) and Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility). Precisely to Ang Lee's adaptation of Austen's novel Kate owes her her first Oscar nomination as a supporting actress, which showed that Winslet had come to the cinema to stay.
These are the credentials of Leonardo and Kate before they met. Although in terms of filmography and recognition (nominations) they could be similar, in terms of the status they had been given they could not be more different. Leonardo DiCaprio was the boy with whom half the world would not mind having died inside the Titanic if that meant spending a night with him in a car first. **Kate Winslet was that weird friend who wears brown lipstick and memorizes Shakespeare while she probably listens to New Order on her walkman.** The high school hottie and the freak. They were destined to dislike each other, not understand each other or, at most, be indifferent to each other. Nothing further than 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 began, she was scared. ** “How am I going to be able to work with such a handsome man?”** But she –he continues– when she met him she discovered that he was a normal guy, which is probably the biggest compliment a guy like DiCaprio can receive. . "We laughed a lot, we had a complicity of brothers, we hit it off right away." If at the beginning of filming she was overwhelmed by his beauty, when Titanic ended, for her DiCaprio was, as she told Vanity Fair, the stinking Leo.
Also on The Oprah Show in 2004, DiCaprio was asked by a teenager in the audience which (movie) kiss she remembered most fondly. Leonardo hesitates for a few seconds of politeness and then settles: Kate Winslet. He explains himself immediately: "We had to repeat it more times than anyone can imagine." Then Oprah plays the actor the images of Kate Winslet talking about him and an emotional Leonardo replies: ** “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 on 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, Nora Ephron would surely have had many things to say about the relationship between Leonardo and Kate Winslet. They, however, were on to other things.
The careers of the two actors took very different paths after Titanic, in the same way that they had before James Cameron's film. It took him years to get rid of that adolescent idol label that so many film critics use to delegitimize actors for the simple fact that girls like them. It was not 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 that actor whom the academy had denied him the nomination for the most nominated film to date was it good?** 15 years later, due to those invisible mechanisms that dominate public opinion, even the last resident of the most remote village in the Pyrenees is clamoring for Leonardo's Oscar and in Madrid this call in the Plaza de Colón, in case he wins.
If Leonardo DiCaprio has had to overcome the sanbenito of adolescent idol, Kate Winslet had to overcome a barrier that makes that of her partner seem like a small thing. As she confessed the other day in her speech at the Baftas, at the age of 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 answered, proving once again that the best revenge is success). That woman, who surely now wants to benefit from the witness protection program, was right in her 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 on the fundamental issue: talent and perseverance, if they are as incontestable as Winslet's, end up imposing themselves on everything. **
After Titanic, she continued to alternate 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 most risky professions in the film industry: 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 more mainstream audience such as Iris, The Life of David Gale or Discovering Never Again. And titles more difficult to classify as Secret Games. ** An eclectic career that gave her six nominations until she finally awarded her an Oscar (certainly not her last) as Leading Actress for The Reader the same year she re-teamed 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 board that was too big, Kate and Leonardo shared the screen under the orders of Sam Mendes, at that time – in case Nora Ephron had any doubts again – Winslet's husband. And if Titanic inflamed the most sensitive souls, Mendes' film taught us that you have to be careful what you dream of not only because it can come true, but because the frustration of not coming true can ruin your life. In addition, he left us to remember one of the most terrifying bloodstains (because they are close and plausible) in cinema in recent years.
“To one of the most special men in my life. Leo, I'm so glad I can't be here and not tell you how much I love you and how much I've loved you for the last 14 years." These were some of Kate's words as she picked up her Golden Globe for Revolutionary Road. He answered her by blowing her a kiss from the audience. And Oprah, who seems to have a monopoly on the relationship between the two, witnessed yet another declaration of love, this time from Leo to Kate. "Congratulations, Kate, I haven't had the chance to tell you in public yet, you've done an incredible job, you won two (Golden Globes) in one night (the other for The Reader) and you deserve it for doing 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 pick up those two Golden Globes because to date she is one of the most nominated actresses with the fewest awards”.**
We could put these last words of Leo today in Kate's mouth. That's why it's so important for her to be present when DiCaprio presumably picks up her Oscar on February 28 (will they do a double and will Kate take 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 – forgive me Nora Ephron – is prettier and more hopeful than most: because ** 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 kiss (or in divorce).**
