Sense and Sensibility is a 1995 British period drama film directed by Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee. The screenplay by Emma Thompson is based on the 1811 novel of the same name by English author Jane Austen. The film stars Thompson and Kate Winslet as the two eldest Dashwood sisters, while actors Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman play their respective suitors.

Producer Lindsay Doran, a longtime admirer of Austen's novel, hired Thompson to write the screenplay. The actress spent four years going through numerous revisions, as she worked on the script between other films as well as into production of the film itself. Whilst initially intending for another actress to portray Elinor Dashwood, Lee convinced Thompson to undertake the part herself. Sense and Sensibility contributed to a resurgence in popularity for Austen's work, and led to many more film and television adaptations in the following years.

The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews upon release, and many awards and nominations. It was nominated for eleven British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA Awards), winning the top award BAFTA Award for Best Film, with Thompson and Winslet both winning the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role award, respectively. Thompson earned her second Academy Award, this time for Best Adapted Screenplay, making her the only person, as of 2011, to have won a writing Oscar and an acting Oscar (Thompson won the Best Actress award for Howards End, in 1993). The film was also nominated for six other Academy Awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, is a British novel by Jane Austen, her first published work under the pseudonym, "A Lady." Jane Austen is considered a pioneer of the romance genre of novels, and for the realism portrayed in her novels, is one the most widely read writers in English literature. A work of romantic fiction, Sense and Sensibility is set in southwest England in 1792 through 1797, and portrays the life and loves of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, daughters of their father Henry's second wife, Mrs. Dashwood. The sisters are starkly different from each other; Elinor is the epitome of prudence and self-control while Marianne embodies emotion and enthusiasm. Elinor, Marianne, and their younger sister, Margaret, are left in reduced circumstances when their father dies and his estate is passed onto their half-brother, John. The novel follows the young ladies to their new home, a meager cottage on a distant relative's property, where they experience love, romance and heartbreak. The philosophical resolution of the novel is ambiguous: the reader must decide whether sense and sensibility have truly merged.

Kate Elizabeth Winslet (born 5 October 1975) is an English actress. She was the youngest person to accrue six Academy Award nominations, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Reader (2008). She has won awards from the Screen Actors Guild, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association among others, and has been nominated twice for an Emmy Award for television acting, winning once for her role as Mildred Pierce in the 2011 mini-series of the same name.

Brought up in Berkshire, Winslet studied drama from childhood, and began her career in British television in 1991. She made her film debut in Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which she received her first notable critical praise. She achieved recognition for her subsequent work in a supporting role in Sense and Sensibility (1995) and for her leading role in Titanic (1997), the highest grossing film at the time, and the highest grossing film of Winslet's career.

Since 2000, Winslet's performances have continued to draw positive comments from film critics, and she has been nominated for various awards for her work in such films as Quills (2000), Iris (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Little Children (2006), The Reader (2008) and Revolutionary Road (2008). Her performance in the last of these prompted New York magazine critic David Edelstein to describe her as "the best English-speaking film actress of her generation". The romantic comedy The Holiday and the animated film Flushed Away (both 2006) are among the biggest commercial successes of her career.

Patrick Doyle (born 6 April 1953, South Lanarkshire, Scotland) is a classically trained composer. A longtime collaborator of actor/director Kenneth Branagh, Doyle is known for his work scoring such critically acclaimed films as Henry V (1989), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Hamlet (1996), and Gosford Park (2001), as well as such noteworthy blockbusters as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Eragon (2006), Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Thor (both 2011). Doyle has been nominated for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.

Doyle was born on 6 April 1953 in Scotland and graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in 1975. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in 2001. He joined the Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987 as composer and musical director creating scores for highly successful productions of such plays as Hamlet, As You Like It, and Look Back in Anger. Doyle's film score debut occurred in 1989 when actor/director Kenneth Branagh commissioned Doyle to compose a score for the Renaissance Film's production of Henry V. The song "Non Nobis, Domine" from the film was subsequently awarded the 1989 Ivor Novello Award for Best Film Theme. He has since scored nine Kenneth Branagh films including Dead Again (1991), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), Hamlet (1996), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), As You Like It (2006), Sleuth (2007), and Thor (2011).

Emma Thompson (born 15 April 1959) is a British actress, comedian and screenwriter. She first came to prominence in 1987 in two BBC TV series, Tutti Frutti and Fortunes of War. Her first major film role was in the 1989 romantic comedy The Tall Guy. In 1992, Thompson won multiple acting awards, including an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, for her performance in the British drama Howards End. The following year Thompson garnered dual Academy Award nominations, as Best Actress for The Remains of the Day and as Best Supporting Actress for In the Name of the Father.

In 1995, Thompson scripted and starred in Sense and Sensibility, a film adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name, which earned her an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role among other awards. Other notable film and television credits have included the Harry Potter film series, Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Wit (2001), Love Actually (2003), Angels in America (2003), Nanny McPhee (2005), Stranger than Fiction (2006), Last Chance Harvey (2008), An Education (2009) and Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010).