The Small Screen Down to Winslet Stepping?

Kate Winslet is taking a trip to the small screen via a miniseries adaptation of the James M. Cain novel Mildred Pierce. Todd Haynes is writing and directing. Sources told Variety that HBO is the lead contender to get the series, but no deal has been struck.

Joan Crawford won an Oscar in 1945 for her portrayal of the eponymous bored housewife who gets into the restaurant business, an enterprise that leads to backstabbing, romance and murder.

Winslet won an Oscar earlier this year for Stephen Daldry's The Reader, so it could seem surprising that she would jump to TV at this particular time. Still, as Variety points out, the success of Grey Gardens for actresses Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange shows that a pay web like HBO creates a large audience for a picture that might not find one as a theatrical release. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio have proved that their generosity is of titanic proportions -- after donating $30,000 to help the last remaining survivor of the doomed ship.

The pair, who starred as tragic lovers in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, along with the movie's director James Cameron, handed over the cash to ensure 98-year-old Millvina Dean can pay her nursing home fees, reports Access Hollywood.

Dean was the ship's youngest passenger at nine months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank en route to New York in 1912. She is the ship's only living survivor.

Photographer Don Mullan made an appeal to help raise money for Dean in the Sunday edition of the Irish Independent newspaper, and also reached out to Winslet, DiCaprio and Cameron in a bid to raise awareness.

Mullan has already set up an exhibition to raise funds.

He explains to the publication, "I figured that if the edition sold out, it would secure Millvina for a full year. My plan, however, was to double the impact and thereby secure her for two years.

"I decided, therefore, at the opening of the exhibition, to publicly challenge James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, 20th Century Fox and Celine to match me dollar for dollar."