The Reader

Stephen Daldry's The Reader won Kate Winslet the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 81st Academy Awards in February 2009, Winslet's first Oscar after five previous nominations across her career. She also won the BAFTA, the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Golden Globe (in the supporting category, an unusual category split during the 2008-2009 season) for the same performance.

The film is adapted from Bernhard Schlink's 1995 German novel Der Vorleser, which had become an international bestseller after its translation into English by Carol Brown Janeway in 1997, selling over four million copies in the United States and being chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club in 1999. Schlink, a German legal academic and former judge, drew the central material from his own postwar generational reckoning with the Holocaust; the screenplay is by David Hare, the British playwright behind Plenty and The Hours.

The cast pairs Winslet with David Kross (then a sixteen-year-old German actor in the central younger-male role) and Ralph Fiennes as the older version of the male protagonist, with Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz, Hannah Herzsprung and Volker Bruch in support. Cinematography is by Chris Menges and Roger Deakins working in tandem (an unusual two-DP production credit), and the score is by Nico Muhly. The production was largely shot in Berlin, Görlitz and at Babelsberg Studios. It is now widely cited in academic discussions of post-Holocaust cinema alongside Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon.