Kate Winslet recalls ‘amazing’ Titanic reunion nearly 30 years later

Kate Winslet has recalled how she reunited with an iconic character from her 1997 film Titanic, almost 30 years later.

The actress appeared on The Graham Norton Show in the UK and shared that during a recording session for her new film Lee she recognized one of the violinist’s in the 120-piece orchestra.

“When we were there, I was looking through the glass into the stage where all the musicians are — [a] huge, 120-piece orchestra — and I’m looking at this violinist and I thought, I know that face,'” the actress shared. Watch the video below:

Kate wondered if perhaps they were related but at the end of the day she decided to talk to him, and discovered it was Jonathan Evans-Jones, who played Wallace Hartley, the violin player who decides to play as the Titanic sinks.

“I went in and he went, ‘Kate, it’s me.’ And you know when the Titanic is going down and the violinist stands up and he goes, ‘Come on, lads,’ and he starts playing? It was that guy! I was like, ‘It’s you!’ It was amazing!”

The Academy Award winner found global fame as Rose DeWitt in the 1997 film alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. She has gone on to star in a wide mix of genres, including Christmas film The Holiday, indie cult classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and as a Nazi guard in The Reader, for which she won an Oscar.

She has remained close with Leonardo, and the pair appeared on screen together in 2008’s Revolutionary Road; she also awarded him his first Oscar for The Revenant.

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Kate has been married to Edward Abel Smith since December 2012, and they welcomed their son, Bear, in 2013; she is also mom to daughter Mia, an actress, whom she gave birth to while married to Jim Threapleton, and son Joe during her marriage to Sam Mendes.

The Avatar: The Way of Water actress met her husband of over ten years during a dramatic holiday on Richard Branson’s Necker Island. 

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At the time he was known as Ned Rocknroll, legally, and Kate shared that he later decided to return to his birth name because he did not “anticipate what might happen if he should have a girlfriend whose name was Kate Winslet and who was quite well-known”.

She continued: “I got to the point where I [was] like, you know, I [was] filling in doctors’ forms and it [said] ‘mother’s name’ and ‘father’s name,’ and I [was] like, ‘Honey … are we going to keep going?’ And he [was] like, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I’ll just change it back.’ So, he changed it back.”