The only pairing more iconic in the 1990s than Titanic's Rose DeWitt Bukater and Jack Dawson were the actors behind the characters, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
And if it weren't for Winslet herself, that perfect casting may not have happened. "I closed the script, wept floods of tears and said, 'Right, I've absolutely got to be a part of this. No two ways about it,'” the actress told Rolling Stone in 1998.
She set off on a mission: She called her agent and asked for director James Cameron's phone number. "He was on the freeway, and he said, 'I'm going somewhere,'" she recalled. "And I think he pulled over, and I said, 'I just have to do this, and you are really mad if you don't cast me.'"
Fortunately, it was that precise spirit that sold Cameron on Winslet as Rose — and she booked the role. But Winslet wasn't done. She was convinced DiCaprio was the perfect Jack to her Rose, so she pretty much stalked him at the Cannes Film Festival, sneaking out of a press conference and cornering him at his hotel. "I was thinking, 'I'm going to persuade him to do this, because I'm not doing it without him, and that's all there is to it,'" she remembered. “‘I will have him.’ Because he is f*****g brilliant. He’s a f*****g genius, and that was absolutely why.”
And so the duo of Winslet and DiCaprio became known to the world as Rose and Jack in the blockbuster hit, which opened on December 19, 1997, and went on to gross $2.19 billion worldwide.
“Titanic was very much an experiment for Kate Winslet and I,” DiCaprio told Deadline in 2016. “We've done all of these independent movies. I loved her as an actress and she said, 'Let's do this together, we can do this.' We did it, and it became something that we could've never foreseen."