Queen tells Kate Winslet motherhood 'is the best job' The Reading-born actress said the ceremony and honour were not comparable to the "terrifying spectacle" of events like the Oscars. "It is a completely different kind of honour," she added. The sense of gravity is enormous and you very much feel you are being acknowledged by the whole country in a way. There is something incomparably overwhelming about that. Winslet won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Reader in 2009, the sixth time she had been nominated. Her father Roger and mother Sally were actors and her grandparents ran a theatre in Reading. After attending drama school, she got her first big break at 17 when she was cast as an obsessive teenager in Heavenly Creatures. A year later, her role in the period drama Sense And Sensibility was rewarded with a British Academy Award and an Oscar nomination. She hit the Hollywood big time with her role in Titanic opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, where her performance as sensitive socialite Rose DeWitt Bukater again won her an Oscar nomination. Appropriately, her CBE was awarded in the year of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. She wore an outfit by Alexander McQueen for today's ceremony, with a hat by Natalie Ellner for Ellsewhere.