Kate Winslet, Sean Penn and Penelope Cruz at the 81st Academy Awards. Cruz won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. (AP)

Los Angeles, Feb. 23: Kate Winslet kept her composure — just — after finally winning an Oscar at the sixth attempt.

The actress — who raised eyebrows for her gushing acceptance speech at the Golden Globes last month — was breathless but staved off the tears as she accepted the best actress gong.

“I got through it, I didn’t blub, I remembered everybody and hopefully the Brits won’t be able to be mean to me,” she said before heading off to the Vanity Fair party after the awards show. She vowed to celebrate her Oscar by getting “massively drunk” at the party.

The actress has previously been nominated for an Academy Award on five other occasions. Winslet, 33, told the audience that she had actually first prepared an acceptance speech when she was just eight.

“I’d be lying if I hadn’t made a version of this speech. I think I was probably eight years old and staring into a mirror,” she said.

With her director husband Sam Mendes looking on, she went on to offer a stream of breathy tributes including to her children and The Reader’s director, Stephen Daldry.

Winslet appeared close to tears as she mentioned the Oscar-winning directors Anthony Minghella and Sidney Pollack, who both died last year. She also went on to refer to her fellow nominees as “goddesses”, singling out veteran Meryl Streep for praise.

“I think we all can’t believe we are in the same category as Meryl Streep at all,” she said to laughs and applause.

After her triumph, Winslet said she had always believed an Oscar was a fantasy that would never come true.

“I feel like an unlikely hero,” she said, “I was not the privileged kid things like this could happen to.

“My mum won a pickled onion competition in the local pub just before Christmas and the Reading Evening Post sent me a picture of her holding her jar. Well, Reading Evening Post, here’s your next Winslet picture!” She said the criticism her Golden Globes speech attracted in the UK had disappointed her.

At the Globes she was stunned after picking up two awards. She told the audience: “I’m sorry, I have a habit of not winning things,” and was so surprised that she even made a flustered apology to fellow best actress nominees Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Kristin Scott Thomas and Angelina Jolie.

Winslet has come a long way since starring opposite the Honey Monster in an advert for breakfast cereal.

That job, when she was 11, was her professional debut but she came from a family who were used to performing.

Both her parents — father Roger and mother Sally — were actors and her grandparents ran a theatre in her home town of Reading, Berkshire.

After attending drama school, she got her first big break when she was cast, aged 17, as an obsessive teenager in Heavenly Creatures.

A year later, her role in the period drama Sense And Sensibility was rewarded with both a British Academy Award and an Oscar nomination. She hit the Hollywood big time with her role in the blockbuster Titanic opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. That performance saw her recognised again by the academy with a nomination.

Off-camera, she married assistant director Jim Threapleton, whom she met on the set of one of her films, and the pair had a daughter, Mia, in October 2000. They divorced in 2001 and she married director Sam Mendes two years later. They had a son, Joe, in 2003.