Kate Winslet believed that the small set they used helped them to develop their character's strained relationship. Hailing Winslet as "the best English-speaking film actress of her generation", David Edelstein of "New York" magazine wrote that "there isn't a banal moment in Winslet's performance—not a gesture, not a word". To avoid a scheduling conflict with "Revolutionary Road", Winslet turned down an offer to star in "The Reader". After her replacement Nicole Kidman left the project due to her pregnancy, Winslet was signed to it. Directed by Stephen Daldry, "The Reader" is based on Bernhard Schlink's novel "Der Vorleser" and is about Hanna
Kate Winslet of courage few young thesps would be capable of and an extraordinary range [...] from animal cunning to unhinged desperation, [Winslet] holds nothing back." That same year, she voiced a fairy for the animated film "Faeries", and won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for narrating the short story "The Face in the Lake" for the children's audiobook "Listen to the Storyteller". In "Quills" (2000), a biopic of the erratic Marquis de Sade, starring Geoffrey Rush and Joaquin Phoenix, Winslet played the supporting part of a sexually repressed laundress working in a mental asylum. Hailing her