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Slumdog Millionaire led an evening of British triumph at the 81st Academy Awards in Hollywood last night, winning eight awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Danny Boyle.

The rags-to-riches story of an orphan from the Mumbai slums who wins the Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? had been expected to achieve glory after sweeping a host of prizes in earlier awards ceremonies, and did not disappoint.

Boyle, 52, bounced up the stairs as he collected the best director award, the film's seventh Oscar of the night. "My kids are too old to remember this now. But when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh," he explained.

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He thanked the Academy audience for their generosity, and went on: "Just to say to Mumbai — unending, unseparable, unborn — all of you who helped us make the film and all of you who didn’t, thank you so much. You dwarf even this guy [the Oscar statuette]."

Boyle beat David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Stephen Daldry (The Reader), Gus Van Sant (Milk) and Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon) to win Best Director.

Slumdog Millionaire's other awards include Best Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Film Editing, Original Score and Original Song.

Accepting the screenplay award, the writer Simon Beaufoy joked: "There are certain places in the universe you never expect to be standing. For me it's the Moon, the South Pole, the Miss World podium — and here."

Britain's night of triumph continued with Kate Winslet's award for Best Actress for her role as a concentration camp guard in The Reader, her first win after five previous nominations.

She admitted that she first started practising her Oscar acceptance speech in front of the bathroom mirror at the age of 8, with a shampoo bottle for a statuette. "I was not the privileged kid things like this could happen to," said Winslet, breathless but not, on this occasion, tearful.

"My mum won a pickled onion competition in the local pub just before Christmas and the Reading Evening Post sent me a picture of her holding her jar. Well, Reading Evening Post, here’s your next Winslet picture!"

There was glory for other British films, with The Duchess taking the Oscar for Costume Design, and Man on Wire, about Phillippe Petit’s daredevil high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in New York in 1974, being named Best Documentary.

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