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Kate Winslet
F O R T H C O M I N G R E L E A S E S
K A T E ' S M O V I E S
T E L E V I S I O N Faries (1999)Anglo Saxson Attitudes (1993) Get Back (1992) Dark Season (1991) Casualty (1989) Shrinks (1988)
V-Monologues (1999) Adrian Mole Peter Pan What the Butler Saw A Game of Soldiers
Issue No. 117 December
17-24, 1997
After drenching her ringlets in Titanic, period-pic vixen Kate Winslet is finally ready to hang up her corset By Stephan Talty Photograph by François Dischinger If you were shown the face of Kate Winslet and asked to free-associate, what words would come to mind? England. Country lanes. Emotion. Thatched roofs. And probably: Sex, please. Until Winslet turned up in Sense and Sensibility, the British period film was nearly sexless. But Kate was carnal and modern. Her ringlets were 1811, but her desires were 1995. "Women didn't have to do that much back then," says Winslet, dressed today in a midnight-blue sweater, hip-hugging slacks and black boots. "They had tranquility, lovely country walks, lots of reading and things. But I think I would have gone mad. I would have liked to have been a man then; I could get all messy and not worry about what I look like, which is when I'm happiest." At 23, Kate Winslet is clearly not a proper girl. At the 1996 Academy Awards (she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Sense), she behaved, by her own admission, like a teenager—even ogling John Travolta. "I fell in love with him in Grease," Winslet says, her eyes wide. "Fell in love with him! I wanted to be Olivia Newton-John. I was completely blown away." Winslet's lack of airs is no doubt a result of her "hippified" childhood in Reading, England. Her grandparents owned the Reading Repertory Theatre, and her parents were struggling actors who lived as if the calendar had never moved past, say, 1968. Backyard family plays gave her an avenue of escape, and her problems with weight (an early nickname was "Blubber") gave her a reason to. "I would always playact," says Winslet. "I did feel that I was in this little world of my own. I felt I was a fairy or something, that I could just fly away." Unhappy in school, she wrote "incredibly dark and blasphemous essays" about Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War ("very, very, very, very strange" she calls them now) and left high school at 16 to pursue acting. Her first gig was dancing with the Honey Monster in a Sugar Pops commercial. Other British TV jobs were followed by the art-house hit Heavenly Creatures (1994), in which she played a rich girl whose feverish fantasy life leads to murder. That performance led to Sense and to worldwide acclaim. In her next film, the grim Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude (1996), Winslet made Sue Bridehead—the ultimate 19th-century "modern" girl— even more modern, by smoking cigarettes and baring all in a nude scene. Now the $200 million Titanic arrives, with Winslet in the role of Rose, a deeply unhappy young American facing a loveless marriage to a rich man until a sexy, dirt-poor artist (Leonardo DiCaprio) sweeps her off her feet. It would be happily ever after—if it weren't for the small matter of that iceberg. "Kate has a kind of timelessness about her," says Titanic director James Cameron. "And she's very technical. She does nine takes, then on the tenth she does everything she did on the previous nine—then adds something to it." Surprisingly, Winslet found herself in tune with the famously perfectionist director. "He's completely manic about he wants, and I'm the same. With that comes tremendous frustration with other people, with yourself, with so many things. You get in terrible states of turmoil. " What jarred her most about making the transition from British filmmaking to Cameron's mammoth set was dimension and speed. "The hugeness of it!" Winslet cries. "One minute we were having lunch, the next minute we were running through crowds of screaming people or hanging off the sinking ship." Winslet's emotionalism is almost violent; she cried when she read the outline for Cameron's film. Here is her description of shooting the post-sinking scenes in Titanic: "Standing on the edge of the tanks on the set and looking in at these wailing actresses and this horrible, horrible, dense...emotion and utter hopelessness. It was really horrific to watch and be part of." It's as if Winslet has become the repository for the emotion successfully repressed in British cinema—which is a great deal of emotion. Her next outing was less trying: She's starring in the adaptation of Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky, a novelized account of Freud's freewheeling childhood in Morocco. "To me it's a tremendous story of joy and living on a shoestring. That became clear to me in Marrakech. The people have nothing." Winslet is clearly looking to bust out of her period dresses. "I really want to work with Danny Boyle and the Trainspotting boys," she admits. "My fear is that they wouldn't even consider me because I've always been seen in these corset-clad pieces." But as the holidays approach, the actress is thinking traditionally: She will return to her grandparents' house for a "very English Christmas." It involves tramping up the road with pillows and gifts, roasting chestnuts, sitting before roaring log fires, caroling—and it doesn't stop until January 2. Her favorite presents to receive are cookbooks and kitchen stuff ("because I'm a bit of a Suzy Homemaker"). To give? "Some kind of clothing, not particularly chic, a cozy jumper or walking socks." Unlike so many Hollywood stars, who seem uprooted, as if floating in a celebrity firmament like beautiful aliens, Winslet is clearly rooted in her homeland—though on her own terms. Asked to describe something about her that would shock her fans, she pauses for a full minute. "Oh, once we were on holiday, and it was getting dark, and my little sister and I wanted to go for a swim," she recalls. "We walked to the beach, and there was nobody there. And I said, 'Should we skinny-dip?' And we did, and it was absolutely freeeezing cold, like you wouldn't believe. And people started arriving, and my family came down, and I said, 'Should we just stand up and walk out?' And we did. And my family was screaming, 'You're mad, you're mad!' " Kate Winslet, naked and laughing, striding from the sea. Talk about a new England. Titanic opens Friday. Source:
Time Out New York
The Times (London) - January 23, 1999 by Robert Crampton
She may be the youngest person to have won two Oscar nominations, but Kate Winslet is no Hollywood waif. Here the home girl shows Robert Crampton what she's made of. Portrait by Robert Erdmann. Near the end of our hour in November at the Dorchester, I asked Kate Winslet: "And you're going to get married next year?" She's a good actress - I've replayed the tape a few times, and there is no hint of a hiccup. She said: "This is the plan, yeah. We're trying to set our date at the moment. I can't wait, I'm so excited." She couldn't wait either: a few days later she was on the front page of every newspaper in the country with her new husband, Jim Threapleton - first in a country churchyard in Reading, her home town, then later having bangers and mash and bakewell tart and custard at the Crooked Billet pub. Ah well. I don't think she would have enjoyed the fib. Although she had the usual, depressing, celebrity complaints about the press - for her they centre on our obsession with her weight, which we'll come to - she has not, at 23, become a cynic. Talking to her felt like talking to (or, more accurately, listening to) a real person - our mutual connivance in this publicity production line notwithstanding. A young, self-confident, middle-class English person. A student just back from her summer on a kibbutz, perhaps. Or a backpacker encountered on a train, putting the world to rights. Much of what she said could be lifted out of its context and used to make her sound silly or pretentious. This makes her painfully open to being, in the parlance of my trade, stitched up. She has been once or twice already and will be again. But not here. Unless you believe in sneering at someone for being young and eager and full of beans, there is nothing to sneer at. She is an enthusiast and empathisiser. She did not use one "very" or "really" or "absolutely" where three will do. To render her speech with full precision would bring protests of overwork from the italic function on this keyboard. The exclamation mark wouldn't be happy either. For instance, her new film, Hideous Kinky - from Esther Freud's memoir of her time as a hippy-child in Morocco - is "so poignant", "so brave", and she is "so, so pleased" to have done something which is "so, so different from Titanic". She loves acting, loves the life, loves the travel, but believes that it is vital not to work all the time because (philosophical tone) "life is so important, so important". She is sensible. She is rooted in a big, happy family. She is keen to be down-to-earth, and for the most part she is down-to-earth. When I met her I asked her what she was wearing so I could describe it for those who like that detail. "A black Joseph suit and a T-shirt I bought in Australia for about $ 20." That combination says: enjoying success in an understated way, not letting it go to her head. If this combination were calculated, then it would be irritating. I don't think it is calculated. (And neither do more jaded observers - the coverage of her down-home wedding was nothing short of ecstatic, The Sun's "Radiant Kate brought genuine warmth to a freezing Britain" being typical.) For the record, she was also wearing black, high-heeled suede boots. Anything else I should know about the boots? "I bought them in Australia, er, from a shop." (Excellent response to poor-quality question.) She talks about things that happened to her when she was 17 - such as her breakthrough film Heavenly Creatures - as ancient history. The early Nineties, let alone the Eighties, are a far-off land. She was born in 1975! She did her GCSEs in 1991! (Four As, 3Bs and a C - "and I could have done better but I was working so it was tricky"). When we were discussing her character's motivation for going to Morocco, she said: "She wanted adventure, colour. They were all doing it then, Lenny Hendrix and all that lot. Is that right?" Before I have the chance to say er, no, actually, she says: "Yeah it is", and on we go. She says that she and Leonardo DiCaprio have "lots of worky, lifey conversations" and I can well imagine it. But it is also significant that he "will call me for advice about something", yet she does not mention it happening the other way around. She was one of those girls who grew up quickly, wanted responsibility and got it. Although success has come early, she was ready for it. "I started working when I was 13. My heart was so in it." She is not one of those performers who perform because their parents got it so wrong they left their child with a craving for affection and attention. Rather, her parents got it very much right, enabling their girl to take her place in the adult world while still, numerically, very young. Fond memories of what must have been a short childhood pour forth. She says hers was a bit like the girls in Hideous Kinky. "It wasn't hippy and it wasn't breadline and desperate, like them, but there was just that sense of holiday, y'know?" She has specialised so far in parts that require a girl who was almost a woman and jolly-well-more-grown-up-than-you-think-I-am (Rose in Titanic, Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and, show-stealingly, Sue Bridehead in Jude). In this new film she plays a woman a little older than herself, a mother. For the first time in a long time she is not seen in a corset and big dress, although Hideous Kinky, set in 1972, almost qualifies as costume drama. She is a convincing mother, too. Her own mother is a qualified nanny, so she grew up "with loads of kids running around. I do understand kids and people say, 'Oh, you're great with kids'." She will have children herself, "but not just yet". She looks a bit like Madonna used to look in her heyday: strong features, strong bones, healthy rather than beautiful. There the similarity ends. She did not flirt. "I'm a home girl," she says at one point. "I'm completely a home girl. I want to see the underwear in the underwear drawer and not shoved in some bag somewhere." She would never move to America. "There was a time when lots of people were saying, Why don't you get an apartment in LA? And I was like, 'Why? What for?'" As in many of her roles, in the flesh she gives out this mixture of an old-fashioned femininity and an old-fashioned, tomboyish feminism that could have seen her, in a different age, doing plucky, unladylike things in the W X empire, incurring official displeasure without threatening serious destabilisation. If there is damage or complication there, I failed to spot it. By rights, there ought to be some of both. As a teenager, she was an overweight, talented, less-well-off pupil in the sort of private theatre school where other girls were regularly "going off for two weeks in Barbados" and "I'd never even heard of Barbados". She says, and here, untypically, she falters: "Because it was a private school, um, this was sort of, like, a huge sort of big, um, just a huge thing in my family, just that one of us was going to go to private school and how could we afford that and that kind of thing." I wonder whether her lack of fluency indicates some guilt at her own good fortune in being the one who, for whatever reason, got to go. At this school - Redroofs in Maidenhead - she was "mentally bullied" for a time - name-calling ("Blubber"), ostracism, other girls ganging up. She says: "I would just sit there and think, 'Let this make you stronger.'" She could draw on the priceless asset of always having known what she wanted to do. She was and is very ambitious - but not, I think, ruthlessly so. Her father was - is - a professional actor. He has struggled - "He did work, Dad, just not big stuff." An uncle, too, was an actor, and one set of grandparents, and now both sisters. "I took it so seriously, the whole acting thing," she says. "I was doing a musical with my older sister, we were really tired, we wouldn't go home till 11pm. Once, mum just said, 'Take the day off school today'. I remember going to school the next day and one girl was being really funny with me. I said, 'What's the matter'? She said, 'My mum thinks it's really bad that your mum lets you have days off school and she says what about your education?' and I turned round to this girl - at the age of nine - and I said, 'What about my career?' But I didn't say it in any kind of snooty way, I really meant that and why couldn't she understand that? It was very important to me." What she calls her "quiet determination" saw her through various girls being "absolutely foul to me". That and the fact that she had other friends. The "phenomenal cattiness" got to her enough for her to plot revenge. Unlike most of us, she got the opportunity to exact it. "I had this fantastic thing happen," she says. "I'm smirking because it was so funny. After I'd done Sense and Sensibility and I'd been nominated for the Oscar and things like that... I was Christmas shopping with my mum and we walked into John Lewis and I saw this girl behind the Clinique make-up counter who was the ringleader of this bunch of people the bullies . I said to my mum, 'I want to go and say something.' She said, 'No Kate, don't!' I think she thought I was going to hit her or something but I'm not a violent person. I said, 'No let's just go and say hello.' "So I walked up and said adopts phoney friendly tone , 'Hello, how are you?' She said, 'Oh fine, how are you?', bit panicky because she remembered how much of a bitch she'd been and suddenly I was a bit well known and she felt very embarrassed, and I said mock-casual , 'So, working at Clinique then?' This girl was going to be a model and have horses and her dad was going to buy her a car if she grew her fingernails and all this stuff and I said, 'Don't you want to be a model or a dancer?' She said imitates whiney voice , 'No, I'm just waiting for, um, y'know a couple of contracts to come in and just doing this for the time being', and I said, 'Oh great', and she said, 'Things good for you then?' and I said bright and breezy , 'Yeah, they are - and I just want to say thanks for being such a bitch 'cos you made me much much stronger so thanks a lot', and just walked off! And I thought, 'Yeeees! Come on!'" She punches the air. She catches herself sounding a bit harsh. Her voice softens. "It wasn't unkind and it made me feel really, really good because she had been horrible and she had made my life she pauses over the right form of words not nice to live for a while for absolutely no reason." Good story: if she'd done that number on the Clinique girl after Titanic, as a major star, it would not reflect well on her. As a minor star, as she then still was, around 1995-96: fair play, I suppose, yet I can't help feeling a bit sorry for that girl, one minute minding her own business at John Lewis, the next getting a kicking from out of nowhere. Persecutors, take note. We return to the subject of her weight. She rails against the press for a while. She says oh, it's boring, and please, not another article about being fat, but she rapidly W X becomes impassioned. She jumps up. "Look! I'm like normal size, right? Normal size! It's just such a load of shit! Part of me just thinks, I wanna say, 'Look, I'm the youngest person that's ever been nominated for two Oscars. There's your proof.'" Are you? "Yes I am actually, which someone on a chat show in America pointed out. And I don't walk around waving that 'I've-been-nominated-for-Oscars' flag. I'm not that kind of person, um, but there's your proof! You don't have to be a fing stick insect to be a successful actor. It drives me fing mad. It doesn't stop." She talks about the pressure placed on young girls and the dangers of anorexia. "You ask any man, 'Do you like someone with a shape or someone with a flat chest?' and they say, 'Oh no, give us something to get hold of!' Don't you? Eh?" Yes, I croak, suddenly throaty. "Yeah!" she roars. "It's like: that's the way we're meant to be, hello? I've got a bust! I've got a bum! At the beginning of the year 1998 , I was 'so fat'. And then a month ago, I'm the body of the year, by some opinion poll. You just think: 'What are you on about?' I didn't go 'hooray', I just thought what's going on? Why are they even voting about bodies? So what! Who cares? Who cares? Let's face it, the world isn't gonna be here for much longer, bloody well get on and live our lives!" But, I say, your weight was an issue when you were younger. "When I was 15 I was very big. I was fat. I wasn't unhappy." How come you were fat? "I just used to eat! I come from a family of people who love their food. I knew that if I wanted to work I would have to lose the weight." At 16, she weighed 13 stone. "Bit of a tank." She went to Weightwatchers and lost three and a half stone. Then, at 18, a director asked her to lose 10lb in ten days. "He said: 'It's an American thing, men love to see the chiselled cheekbones' and I said, look, I exercise, I eat healthily, I've lost a lot of weight and I don't think I want to put my body through anymore, actually. But I'll give it a go. Then I got very in my head about it and I think I read somewhere that Keanu Reeves had lost loads and loads of weight for Little Buddha and I think I thought that weight loss was part of it being an actor . I thought, well OK. Got so ill! So thin! So tired. Terrible, terrible state. I was a bone, it was horrible." She was down to an apple a day. Then it got worse. "I was going off to do some press for Heavenly Creatures in America and I thought, 'Right, OK, Americans, weight loss', and then I got so thin, so thin. And passed out. Had a blind panic attack where I couldn't see." She was 7st 10lb. And what does she weigh now? "Absolutely no idea, couldn't tell you. Waste of time in the morning. I got very very ill and frightened myself and sorted it out. I wasn't one of the extreme cases. Now, I'm sort of cured of all that. I just got fed up spending at least 70 per cent of my thought space every day on myself... I just snapped out of it." She smoked roll-ups throughout our interview. I should have asked if cigarettes replaced overeating, but it's only just occurred to me now. I did ask if she drank much. "I'm like everyone - I love a drink. But I don't enjoy getting drunk. I'm a bit of a control freak so I don't like the feeling of out of control. I've never taken any drugs in my life, I really haven't. Not even a drag of a joint. Just can't be doing with that. Also I didn't go to university, that's where you do Ecstasy or coke or whatever." But film sets are too? "Yes, film sets are too, but - I don't know why but I think people must see that I'm just absolutely not a drug taker. No one's ever offered me anything at work, never ever. But apparently they are very druggie places. Maybe I'm just completely blind and naive. I think I am quite naive about drugs. Well I am. Don't know what they are, don't know what they do. Don't really want to. It's like I get enough from my life, thank you." Where does the control-freakishness come from? Are the rest of the family like that? "No, they're not really. I've always been quite an organised person. Being introduced to the film world at such a young age I had to look after myself a bit." She says that she protected her family from "what a film was really about". She does not elaborate. "I didn't want to give them the baggage, so I'd deal with it very much myself. I used to do my own tax and things. I've always had quite a mathematical brain." Protecting her family, particularly protecting her elder sister Anna, evokes as much passion as the saga of Titanic Kate, size 14. I mention a (spectacularly bitchy) story in the papers which said that Anna resented Kate's success. She says: "I just want to say right here that is absolute bollocks. I will swear on my entire family's life. I have never, ever, ever had a problematic relationship with any of my family members. We're incredibly close." She goes on to praise her sister's abilities lavishly, unstintingly. Does she feel guilty about her success? "Yeah, yeah, I do feel guilt. I think Christ, why can't I share this out?" She says that Anna would have been better in her current role than she is. I am sure she means it. She says: "I have such a thick and tight family behind me. If I did go and change and think that I was a star I would get severely hammered for it." People think that celebrities, especially performers, must be selfish, self-indulgent, wild, egotistical people. The more I meet, the more I think they are more often the opposite: straight, focussed, hard workers who get the drive necessary to maximise their talent from a sense of responsibility to something bigger than themselves - a family, a profession, a cause even. It's just a theory. Kate Winslet fits it rather well. Source: Kate Winslet: Heart of the Ocean Website (no longer online)
April 9, 2001
From the mouth of one of its own, a trendy London is getting a kicking. "The Ivy restaurant?" says Kate Winslet, blue eyes blazing in a strong, creamy face. "I can't stand it. I've got a real thing about it, it's a celebrity hang-out and I cannot stand celebrity hang-outs. It's like my doctor said recently: 'Maybe you should think about where you'd like to have the baby', and I said: 'Not The Portland.' It's a celebrity baby factory (she giggles mischievously). I'm sorry, but it is." And this is how Kate Winslet is. The mother-to-be may be the youngest actress to be twice nominated for an Oscar but she is also funny, irrepressible, down-to-earth and more than happy to talk about her life: "I'm not smoking now, of course, but I love a drink and I love a party, but with my mates and Jim's. I'm not one for hanging out at the Met Bar and being photographed coming out all skewy-eyed. I've never been one for drugs, they never came my way when I was a teenager and by the time they did, I'd grown up a bit too much." This is the way she talks, openly, unstoppably. It's often interpreted by interviewers as honesty and enthusiasm, and there is that too, but really (because no one is going to bare their soul in a 30-minute interview) Kate Winslet is a consummate and generous professional. She wants to give you something to take away. She is driven to give you her best. Everyone identifies with Kate Winslet - or at least the characters she plays. The latest is Ruth, a headstrong young Australian, whom we see in the opening frames of Holy Smoke wearing a white sari having gone native in Delhi. Everyone wants to be like Kate Winslet because she's always diving in, looking for the real stuff, pushing at boundaries, whether as Marianne Dashwood, the passionate idealist in Sense And Sensibility or Sue Whitehead, the unmarried mother in Jude, the rebellious Rose in Titanic or the hippie mum in Hideous Kinky. If you're an adult, you think that, at the very least, she's an impressive talent. If you're an adolescent girl, you think she is unbelievably cool (after all, she effs and blinds and has starred in the biggest- grossing movie of all time). If you're female, over the age of 12 and not built like a scarecrow, then Winslet has made a crucial difference to your self-image, putting curves - at a glance, I'd say a size 12 on top, 14 on the bottom - back on the screen. And not only back on the screen but straight into the arms of Leonardo di Caprio no less. And if you're any of the above and British, you can't help but see her as a kind of walking advertisement for down-to-earth, get on and muck in British spirit. This is the woman, remember, who served bangers and mash at her wedding reception in the Crooked Billet pub in Reading and then honeymooned in Scotland in November. How's that for unponcey? On our behalf, Kate Winslet has given two fingers to the skinny Gwynnies and moaning Winonas. Everything she does both in her work and private life is strong and beefy (she turned down the Gwynnie part in Shakespeare in Love on the grounds that it wasn't enough of "a stretch"). So it's astonishing to discover that the old Kate has been shed somewhere in the Australian desert and that, in fact, we ain't seen nothing yet. Holy Smoke is the big one, not in terms of Oscars or even Golden Globes, (both of which seem scared off by the subject matter); but in the Kate Winslet oeuvre, it's the one that demonstrates her talent at its most fearless and mature. It's the story of Ruth, a woman who falls under the influence of a charismatic Indian guru, is lured home to be "deprogrammed" by a Cuban-heeled exit counsellor, played by Harvey Keitel, and the complex struggle that ensues between his smooth, professional expertise versus her lack of inhibition and self-confidence. Keitel's strong performance, even the moments when he's trussed up in a dress pleading for sexual favours (Winslet: "So what are you?" Keitel: "A dirty old man"), is eclipsed by hers. There's a point where she stands naked in the desert and urinates involuntarily on the sand between her legs. You can't imagine anyone else having pulled it off. Was anyone else considered for the part? "Yeah, I heard that Jane [Campion] met 600 people," says Winslet, and laughs. Everything up until now has been, she says, mere training for the ordeal that was Holy Smoke. "Acting is about taking risks and this was just so risky." The intimacy of the scenes was "really difficult. It was like 'Woah, hang on a minute'." But nothing compared to the arduous mental preparation. "Jane is pretty brutal. She'll come up to you and say [switching into a languid Australian accent]: 'Er, Kate, that was really baaaad.' She makes you explore sides of yourself and sometimes you don't like to have to admit certain things. She'd say: 'You have a real thing about people liking you, don't you?', and I'd say: 'Well, not really ... but on the other hand', and she'd say: 'Make up your mind, you're contradicting yourself.' She demands total honesty." The liking thing is interesting. Winslet has a reputation for team-spiritedness, for being best friends with the make-up girl and the props boys and she's keen to demonstrate her normality ("I'm dying for a pee" is the first thing I hear her say). She was bullied at school in her teens for being overweight and you can't help but connect this with her subsequent unwavering determination to be the most popular, in-demand, actress of her generation. Along the way she has acquired a reputation for becoming intensely, even dangerously, involved in her parts. "I'm always fainting and going to hospital, honestly." She collapsed on the set of Sense And Sensibility. So was that corsets or emotion? "Corsets, emotion and rain," she replies. But it was during the making of her first feature, Heavenly Creatures, that her sanity was most at risk. "I came home from that film and I had no idea who I was and I was really frightened. It taught me to protect myself and with Holy Smoke I had to apply those lessons," she says. When she finally saw the end product she was shocked at what she had created. "It had taken on this bigger life and I just thought, that is not me at all. I was like, 'Who the hell are you?'" She says she doesn't recognise herself but the characterisation feels very like the Kate Winslet we all think we know. "Well, I really enjoyed being Ruth. I loved the costumes [saris and hippie gear] and running around with no shoes on. That's completely me. And a lot of Ruth's mor- als, sticking up for what you believe in and being honest and headstrong, that's very much me. "Playing her I realised that she was a lot younger mentally. I had to take myself right back [Ruth is about 20, Winslet was 23 at the time of filming]. When I was 20 I thought: 'Yeah, I know exactly who I am. I absolutely know what I want from my life.' Cut to me four years later and I am a drastically different person." It's probably hard for Winslet to appreciate that most of us had little idea of who we were at 20, or were anything like as self-assured at 24, let alone so far into a career (besides starring in the film of Robert Harris's Enigma and another film about the Marquis de Sade, she will co-produce on her next project, the film of Therese Raquin). By her own admission she was an early starter, sorting out her own affairs, looking after her work interests in order to "protect" her parents. She made her first film at 17 and at 19 she was nominated for her first Oscar for Sense And Sensibility. The same year she was on the phone to James Cameron lobbying for a part in Titanic. Is it true that she shouted "I am Rose" down the phone at him until he relented? "Not quite. But I did phone him up and I said [serious nanny voice]: 'Look, you really do need to cast me in this role', and he laughed and I said: 'Laugh all you like but if you don't, you're going to regret it.' Actually I was the first person they cast which, looking back on it, was bloody brave of them." The finger episode, when Rose makes a decidedly late 20th century gesture as she escapes in the lift, was presumably a bit of ballsy Winsletian improvisation? "That was actually Jim Cameron's idea, which we had a row about - I said it feels too contemporary." It's the old overlap again, assuming that Kate is this gutsy force who refuses to conform to type. "That is pretty true of me, actually. Jim [Threapleton, her husband] was saying the other day: 'You know you should really treat yourself to something', because I'm not very good at saying 'Well, I've got a bit of money now, so I'll buy myself something nice'. That said she has recently bought her parents something nice - a house. "He said: 'Maybe we should get you a little sports car' and I went 'Eyuuurk!'." She lurches forward tongue out, eyes bulging. "He said: 'You know you are allowed to have some of the superstar things' and I said: 'No I'm not, you see, because I refuse to do what people expect me to do. That's very much who I am, so I'm much happier driving around in our little green Mini, thank you.'" She married Threapleton, whom she met when he was third assistant director on Hideous Kinky, four months after filming Holy Smoke. There's no doubt that it is her coming-of-age film because she carries through it a luminous beauty. The slightly whiney girlishness that sometimes surfaced unintentionally has been replaced by a confident womanliness, and for the first time you are aware of her extraordinary sexual power. "Well, I like that," she beams. "That's really good. I am very in touch with who I am and I think that, without wanting to sound mushy, that is to do with being married and being with Jim, because there's no one out there to question me any more. He just loves me for me and vice versa and that is really grounding." So does she feel that Holy Smoke was like a rite of passage? "Yeah. When it was over, I had this overwhelming feeling of 'Oh my God, I've just closed a chapter of my life'. It felt like I was exorcising sides of myself." Maybe some of those demons were to do with her much-discussed body image: at the age of 16 she was 13 stone, then she became dangerously thin, and ever since her figure has been the subject of intense press scrutiny. Did she love the way she looked, naked in the desert? "I have to say I was quite chuffed because it was a bloody hard scene to do and I was racked with paranoia as I always am with every nude scene. Not that I wasn't eating several packets of crisps before that scene. But yes, I was pleased." Now she says she can't wait to get a proper bump to show off. But she's not ready to stay at home with the family yet. "My feeling about why I like making films is you can come away from a film feeling so changed and touched. I really love that, the thought that I could be giving people a lot" Source: The Sunday Herald Magazine
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