Kate Winslet recently had an unexpected reunion with an unforgettable Titanic passenger who, sadly, went down with the ship.
The actress recalled spotting a familiar face while overseeing the score recording for her war drama Lee.
"I was there at the scoring at Abbey Road," Winslet recalled in a new interview with The Graham Norton Show. "Alexandre Desplat did our score — I don't know how the heck we got him to say yes, but he was amazing. And when we were there, I was looking through the glass into the stage where all the musicians are — huge, 120-piece orchestra. And I'm looking at this violinist and I thought, 'I know that face.'"
Kate Winslet in 'Titanic'.CBS via Getty Images
Winslet couldn't immediately place him. "And then the day goes on, and a few of the musicians start going, 'It's [him]!' and they're sort of pointing at him," she recounted. "I'm thinking, 'Am I related to this person? Who is this person?' And at the end of the day, I thought, 'Okay, I've got to go in.' So I went in, and he went, 'Kate, it's me!'"
That's when it dawned on her. "You know when the Titanic is going down, and the violinist stands up and he goes, 'Come on, lads,' and he starts playing?" she asked on the talk show. "It was that guy! I'm like, 'It's you!' It was amazing."
Winslet was thrilled. "It was him. It was just wonderful, and there he was," she said. "We had so many moments like that in the film, where people I've either worked before or really known for a long time [and] kind of grown up in the industry with, they just showed up for me, and it was incredible."
Jonathan Evans-Jones in 'Titanic'.CBS via Getty
The violinist in question is Jonathan Evans-Jones, who portrayed Wallace Hartley in the 1997 Oscar-winning film and has performed violin on scores for nearly three decades. Evans-Jones contributed to numerous DreamWorks animated projects like the Shrek and Kung Fu Panda movies, and he has performed on the soundtracks for blockbusters like The Batman, Spectre, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Kong: Skull Island.
Elsewhere in the interview, Winslet revealed how someone helped her recreate a staggering photograph of Lee's subject, the war correspondent Lee Miller, washing herself in Adolf Hitler's bathroom. "This photograph is actually taken by Annie Liebowitz," she said. "Anna Wintour — we all know who Anna Wintour is — she was hugely supportive of the film, and she said, 'Oh, if you are recreating the bathtub scene, I have to send Annie.' And I said, 'Okay, if you have to.'"
That moment felt like a culmination of the years Winslet passionately spent trying to produce the movie, which was first announced in 2015. "It was an extraordinary night, actually, when we filmed the bathtub scene," she said. "Just extraordinary, mind-blowing. I sort of couldn't really believe we were there because I was developing the film for seven years and raising the financing. Made it at the end of 2022, and it's now nine years later, and so some of these moments for me I just was like, 'I'm really doing it. It's really happening.'"
Watch Winslet discuss her Titanic reunion in the clip from The Graham Norton Show above.
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