When Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Sense and Sensibility arrived in cinemas in 1995, it carried the quiet confidence of a literary adaptation done right: true to the book, while energetic and contemporary. At its heart was a 19-year-old Kate Winslet, in her second film role, playing Marianne Dashwood.
Winslet was still mostly unknown when she was cast by the director Ang Lee, joining a cast of some of the era’s biggest names: Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, Harriet Walter, Imelda Staunton and Thompson herself – as well as her now-husband Greg Wise.
“That was incredibly overwhelming,” says Winslet of working alongside so many actors she admired. Speaking to Bazaar in a new video, she said: “I remember being particularly terrified meeting Alan Rickman for the first time, and feeling so small. He just felt so tall and important. But then of course I discovered very quickly how lovely and empathetic and kind he really was.”
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Such nervousness was not the norm for Winslet, she says, adding that she was “actually quite fearless in those days”. In fact, she didn’t feel the pressures of taking on a beloved Jane Austen character – in part due to her inexperience at the time. “I was too young to understand the magnitude of great literature, so luckily, I was so naïve and inexperienced that I certainly didn’t carry any of that fear in me,” she explains.
Indeed, she credits Sense and Sensibility as being particularly formative for her as an actress. “It was one of the most memorable, significant experiences of my working life,” she says, adding that something particularly memorable from shooting was when she developed hypothermia.
“There’s a scene when Marianne first meets Willoughby (played by Greg Wise),” Winslet recounts, “and he comes out of the mist on his horse being all glamorous and soaking wet and gorgeous. I repeatedly threw myself down this hill, tumbling and rolling. It was a freezing-cold day and we had rain machines.”
Fortunately for Winslet, her co-star Wise was on hand to help warm her back up. “[He] put my feet into his armpits to warm them back up,” she says. “Apparently it is the quickest way of getting the heat back into someone’s body when they become extremely cold.”
