Smash hit

"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!"

She said the criticism her Golden Globes speech attracted in the UK had disappointed her.

At the Globes she was stunned after picking up two awards. She told the audience: "I'm sorry, I have a habit of not winning things," and was so surprised that she even made a flustered apology to fellow best actress nominees Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Kristin Scott Thomas and Angelina Jolie.

Winslet has come a long way since starring opposite the Honey Monster in an advert for breakfast cereal.

That job, when she was 11, was her professional debut but she came from a family who were used to performing.

Both her parents - father Roger and mother Sally - were actors and her grandparents ran a theatre in her home town of Reading, Berkshire.

After attending drama school, she got her first big break when she was cast, aged 17, as an obsessive teenager in Heavenly Creatures.

A year later, her role in the period drama Sense And Sensibility was rewarded with both a British Academy Award and an Oscar nomination.

She hit the Hollywood big time with her role in the blockbuster Titanic opposite Leonardo DiCaprio.

That performance saw her recognised again by the Academy with a nomination.

Off-camera, she married assistant director Jim Threapleton, whom she met on the set of one of her films, and the pair had a daughter, Mia, in October 2000.

They divorced in 2001 and she married director Sam Mendes two years later. They had a son, Joe, in 2003.

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