Kate Winslet

Kate gets real

When Titanic launched Kate Winslet on to the Hollywood A-list, it seemed inevitable that she would start churning out big-budget blockbusters. But she escaped and made a series of imaginative, off-beat films - she's about to star in Jane Campion's Holy Smoke. Now, at 24, she's married, pregnant and couldn't give a stuff about fame, food and fat

'I'm pregnant... I'm sick... I'm terribly excited... We're both terribly excited...We're incredibly happy... I'm forgetting everything, a fucking basket case, a lunatic... I'm over the moon... Listen to me waffling on...' There is a scene in Holy Smoke, after the film has started to unravel into a splendid derangement, when Kate Winslet stands naked in the Australian scrubland, a great sky behind her, and urinates on to the sand.

  1. Holy Smoke
  2. Production year: 1999
  3. Countries: Rest of the world, USA
  4. Cert (UK): 18
  5. Runtime: 114 mins
  6. Directors: Jane Campion
  7. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Kate Winslet, Pam Grier
  8. More on this film

She wasn't actually urinating, she says; there was a saline drip attached behind her head. But she did insist on trying one take for real. 'And the problem is, of course, that the wee dribbles down one leg.' There is something very Kate Winslet about this scene, and her candid describing of it: there she stands, naked and voluptuous in the bare light, with her soft and even features, her steady gaze, her strong and shapely body, her feet planted very firmly on the ground. Nudity is not an act of narcissism here; she does not become an object modelling for the camera lens, a skinny starved star. Rather, it is as if she is saying: 'Take me as you find me, this is me.'

'This is me' is a constant refrain from Kate Winslet. Her conversation - slung about with swear words, breaking down into laughter, interrupted by self-mocking insults ('Listen to me, I sound like a hippy idiot... a wanker...'), continually going off on engaging detours ('Fucking waffle, ah well, that's me') - always comes back to this resolution to remain herself: when she calls a spade a spade (or a 'fucking' spade, more like). When she talks about her period or, now, of course, her morning sickness. When she describes meeting Winona Ryder when her left tit was hanging out, or when she was introduced to Emma Thompson and was exultant because the older, admired actress talked about needing a pee. When she says her idea of romance isn't a sentimental Valentine's Day card but, say, a man she fancies sending her his smelly socks. When she refuses to be a 'stick insect', a 'fucking model' and tucks into chocolate cake with the gusto of an over-excited birthday girl. When she insists on attending the funeral of a beloved friend rather than the premiere of Titanic. When she marries film director Jim Threapleton at a tiny church surrounded by her non-celebrity friends and eats bangers and mash afterwards. And when she becomes pregnant at the age of 24 with no anxieties about interrupting her blossoming, triumphant career because, as she tells me, 'acting for me has always come second'.

'This is me,' she insists: not thin, not delicate, not refined, not beautiful (oh but she is, for all her claims of 'my bum's massive, my breasts are saggy, my back's spotty, how can I do this job?'), not spoilt, not in thrall to success and the alluring image up there on the screen; but free, happy, girlish, lucky, in love, and having such fun. This is me, she is saying as she kicks off her shoes and curls up on the sofa and insults herself - this is sane Kate: dottily, recklessly sane, valiantly ordinary, going full tilt for difficult normality.

For, of course, Kate Winslet's life so far has not been ordinary at all. She has always known she would be an actress. She grew up in a theatrical family in Reading, the middle one of three sisters, and she remembers the early passion she brought to the role of Mary in her school's Nativity play. She was famous before she reached adulthood. A lot of her growing up was done in the public eye and it is almost as if her outward show of emphatic youthfulness and unworldliness comes from not having had a real girlhood. Her triumphs and her mistakes were seen, discussed, the stuff of gossip columns: that kiss, that comment, that dress, the weight gained or lost under the speculative gaze of the camera.

She was only 17 when she starred in Heavenly Creatures, the film based on the true story of two girls who murdered the mother of one of them - a slightly perverse, intense, just short of over-the-top performance that won the admiration of the critics. Since then, she has been in Ang Lee's beautiful version of Sense and Sensibility (Lee called Winslet a bold, raw talent; Winslet fainted on set several times, so immersed was she in the masochistic, intense romanticism of her character, Marianne); in Jude (as Sue Bridehead opposite Christopher Eccleston's moody Jude); as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.

She didn't just fall into the parts by luck, she went after them with the determination of a Rottweiler. When she auditioned for Sense and Sensibility, for instance, she was supposed to be reading the minor role of Lucy but thought, 'fuck this'. She went for Marianne instead, sweeping all objections aside. Later, she besieged director James Cameron with her passionate desire to play Rose in Titanic.

Titanic was a blockbuster which would have sunk a less buoyant, resolute actress than herself. As Rose, you can sense her fighting her corner in the film, lustrously beautiful and strong and unafraid (distressed by, yet scornful of the critics who called her 'too fleshy'). And so she looked set to become part of the Hollywood machine - another star collecting her millions from the big-budget monsters. She broke free, to the alarm of advisers, turning down scripts from America and choosing instead to star in a modest British film, Hideous Kinky.

Now Holy Smoke, Jane Campion's film, is about to be released. Kate Winslet plays Ruth, a young woman who goes to India with a friend and there meets a guru (as Anthony Lane in The New Yorker comments, the movie 'has a strong smell of the 1970s about it'). She is enthralled. 'Something amazing has happened to me,' she says, and refuses to return from Delhi to her suburban home in Sydney. Her mother flies in to rescue her, and eventually lures her back under the pretence that her father is dying. She returns, wearing her Eastern robes and her third eye, to find him playing golf. The family fork out thousands of dollars to hire the 'Number One exit counsellor in America', PJ Waters.

Enter Harvey Keitel, and the film becomes a frenetic two-hander between feisty, enlightened, uninhibited, bitchy, enraged, mad, sane Ruth, and shrewd, patronising, sinister, controlling Waters. The duel starts as a discussion about reality and truth, but quickly becomes wilder. Kate steals the show, extraordinary in the power and range of her performance. Jane Campion, when casting Holy Smoke, says that she needed to find an actress who could be equal to Keitel, and with Winslet she more than succeeds. She's a young woman, with a blatantly girlish vocabulary, but as an actress she is remarkably grown-up.

The first time I talk to Kate Winslet she is casual, bare-footed and chatty on a sofa in a London hotel at the end of a long day, slugging vodka (this was pre-pregnancy), munching crisps, rolling cigarettes. Conversation with her is rather like a high-spirited pyjama party - ask a question and she charges off, anecdotal, digressional, giggly, complicit, deliberately uncool. She says that the experience of making Holy Smoke was 'fucking unbelievable. When I saw it for the first time, saw what I'd made of Ruth, I thought to myself: "Oh my God, I've created a bitch; Frankenstein's monster." But I loved it; I loved her. Such a fucking little cow - although she was even more vile in the script. I read the script, and I knew I had to give weight to this girl, to justify her and to make her into someone that the audience can understand. I had to be over-the-top and yet put a lid on her and make her believable. I have to say that I could have found the whole thing really hard. Jane Campion is a tough director.' She waves her roll-up in the air, scattering shreds of tobacco, glugs from her chunky tumbler, pushes hair off her face. 'She's gorgeous, wonderful, but bloody hard. She's mad; she's a self-confessed mad person. Plus, she's humane and honest and intuitive, and she pushes her actors, challenges them. She asks us to be as revealing as possible, as open as you can be; to transfer the whole of your self on to the character that you are playing.'

With Ruth, Kate Winslet felt that the director 'wanted a clone of a younger version of Jane herself. She kind of embodied this vision she's had. And I knew she had to let go; she wasn't letting go of Ruth and giving her to me. In the end I said: "I can't do everything you're telling me to do. It's me up there, not you. It's got to be what I want her to do, otherwise I promise you, I'll just give you a crap performance." And she was thrilled with that. Thrilled. She thrives on honesty.

'After, I gave myself one hundred fucking per cent to the film. I still can't believe what I did. It was a journey. I'm no longer so scared what people think of me. Jane would say: "Do you think Ruth cares what people think of her?" "No, of course not; she is unashamed and won't be judged." "And do you?" "No, no, though of course I want people to like me." "Ah, so you do care then." It changed me. It opened me up, made me less afraid. If I'm afraid of something, it's like, "See a mountain, Kate, and you climb it girl, or what's the point?" To back away from fear is the worst thing you can do. Fear shows.'

She was very fearful after Titanic and her hurtle into stardom. 'I never had a plan to be a big star. I wanted to do things that were more "Kate". After Titanic - and it was the number one blockbuster, the sums were huge, oh-so-fucking huge, and what the stars were earning was enough to feed all the families in Brixton for the rest of their lives - I lost my intuition. I lost my rhyme and reason. I had a loose hold on things. So much was expected of me. I was terrified people would think I had changed because of it. I remember afterwards when I was walking along a road and I saw this old friend I'd been at school with coming towards me and I was terrified. I panicked. I thought: "She's going to think I'm different." But it was all exactly the same: chat chat chat. And then she said, "You must have been so scared." And I was. I knew I'd be deeply unhappy if I did another film like that. I needed to affirm my faith in myself. It had all been too much. I told myself, "What you believe in is at stake. Your happiness is at stake." I knew that for a fact. If I'd gone to Hollywood, lived there, bought into the system, I'd have been so depressed. I'd have lost myself. I really do have a big problem with the film-star thing. I don't think of me like that and I don't want to. And Jim doesn't think of me like that. He met me before Titanic came out, he hadn't really seen me in anything. He met me. Kate. He loved me for me. Plus, things are only expected of you if you allow them to be. And it's a fight but I am not going to be beaten on this one.'

She will not be a star: her schoolgirl language and her contempt for what Hollywood represents is all about asserting the 'real' Kate. 'It always seems unreal to me, pretty unbelievable. I say: "Kate, how has this happened?" But it would seem more unreal if I lived in Malibu and had three cars. I saw Leo [Leonardo DiCaprio to us] the other day. I was at a party for Quills [the film about the Marquis de Sade she has recently finished filming]. Me and Jim were leaning up against the bar and this posse of boys came in wearing masks and Halloween gear. I recognised him from the way he walked. He ripped his mask off. He hadn't changed a bit. Of course, he's famous, one of the most famous actors in the world. But he's the same person and I'd been so worried about him. He still does care about everything he does. He hasn't just become some bullshit film star. I hate all of that crap. I won't do it. I still go to a public gym in north London, not some private fucking place. I love it. Families go there for days out. People who've known me all my life say, "How you doing Kate?" and I love all of that - normal relationships, normal life. If I'm going to change, my life and experiences should change me for the wiser and more profound.'

She is emphatic that her fame has not altered her relationship with her family, and when I suggest it must be hard for her two sisters, who are also actresses and inevitably labouring in her shadows, she simply praises their abilities and tells me how happy she was that she and her elder sister got married within five weeks of each other. Of course, it is easy for her to be generous, harder for them. Easier for her - the deservedly lucky and luminously fair - to talk about luck and unfairness.

About her marriage to Jim Threapleton, she is characteristically immoderate. They met while filming Hideous Kinky in Morocco. She says that she took one look at him and 'just knew... I thought fuck fuck fuck.' She wasn't expecting a serious romance. She was recovering from the Titanic experience. Moreover, she had recently attended the funeral of her one-time lover and best friend, Stephen Tredre, who died of the cancer that had been diagnosed shortly after they broke up. She was in Morocco to act and to get a suntan and be carefree at last. But she saw Jim Threapleton and that was it. They married in November 1998, honeymooned in the wilds of Scotland, and spend as much time as possible together in their home in north London. Now she says that 'marriage has made me safer. I have become much less worried about pleasing other people. There is nothing in my life that is more important than my relationship with Jim.' She stops dead and glares wildly. 'Oh fuck, listen to me, I'm trying very hard to make us sound less schmaltzy, slushy. We're just an ordinary couple. We have rows. We're both opinionated. It's not as if we're a domestic, supersonic couple. I don't just cook him meals. We eat...' - she waves her drink in the air - 'takeaways!'

Food has become a symbol of the Winslet way. Her bangers-and-mash lifestyle is not a simple matter. Her weight, subject of a great deal of media attention over the years, has also in the past obsessed her. When she was a girl, she was known as 'Blubber'. When she was a teenager, she weighed 13 stone, and was bullied at school. She became anorexic, fasted and binged. When I tell her about a survey I had just seen, showing that the majority of teenage girls, however skinny they are, feel that they are overweight, she opens her mouth, starts to say something, then bursts into tears. 'Awful', she keeps saying. 'Awful.'

'I was like that', she says. 'I was like all those girls. Fuck. An unstoppable feeling. I starved myself. So seductive - all my bones sticking out. I was that child, looking at the images of models in films, magazines, fashion shows. This is what girls are brought up to believe, that to be thin is to be loved, adored, perfect. That's how they'll get a boyfriend - by becoming like a stick insect. Look at Marilyn Monroe, though - size 16 and gorgeous. Look at Barbra Streisand, a gorgeous big bum on her. We don't see people like her any more, we just see these perfect thin people. I was huge at 16, I ate like a pig. I was not happy. And when I was thin, I was so boring about food; all I could think about was what I'd eaten. I wasn't happy then either. I don't believe in diets. It's about how you are in yourself. I hate the way all this has fucked up young girls. When there was all that press comment about my weight after Titanic, I wasn't angry so much as disappointed. I was so disappointed. But then I thought, "Well, fuck you, I'm the youngest person to be nominated for the Academy Awards, and that wasn't for being a skeleton." And I thought I had a way of helping people here, by not getting sucked in to that again. I'll not do that. I've had lots of letters from mothers who have anorexic daughters, thanking me for the things I've said. That's gratifying.'

Kate Winslet is not a simple woman - the unthreatening and garrulous 'our Kate', who wears Gap jumpers and swears like a teenage trooper. She's determinedly simple, but it's against the odds - a wilful, complicated kind of naturalness. After the news of her pregnancy, when I talked to Kate Winslet again, she said that her habit of speaking her mind and being open was not a strategy, but it was certainly a decision she had made: her way of surviving. 'I have always been myself. In the early days of Heavenly Creatures and Sense and Sensibility, I was myself, but trying to sound really intelligent and alert, as if I understood Shakespeare and Jane Austen, when I mean, fuck it, I'd hardly even heard of Jane Austen. I was trying to be terribly grown-up and yet a real girl - it was an odd mixture and I think it exhausted me. Since then, and especially since meeting Jim, I feel I am brave enough to be me. He allows me to be me. I have confidence in myself in a way that I didn't before. Being open, vulnerable, well it is not a tactic but I would say that I have been stung sometimes, and I'd also say it's something I will not be beaten on. I will not be changed because of what some stupid newspaper wants to say. I don't read stuff about me, but I did see a little thing about me in Hello! recently, and it described how Jim had proposed to me by going down on one knee. Crap. He didn't. But I'm never going to tell anyone how it happened, because that's between us and nobody else. So maybe I've learnt how to be less open. To protect what is precious.'

She is reluctant to speak too much about her pregnancy - she is not yet past the crucial first trimester, and feels 'superstitious' about making plans. She will say that she has been feeling 'very very sick'. They confirmed she was pregnant on Valentine's Day; and yes, they had planned it ('Well, at least we hadn't been not trying...'). 'We knew it would cause all kind of work hiccups - although actually as it turns out, everything has worked out very well.' Therese Raquin (a film she will produce) has been postponed until next year, but that's 'a blessing in disguise, because it means that one of the actors we really want will be available'. Anyway, she feels 'no fear' about her career. 'I've never been one for changing what is real in order to make my career buzz. My career comes second. I love it, but if I'm not working all the time I am happy. There are some actors who do back-to-back jobs and are anxious when others are in the limelight. That's not me. So I'm just happy, excited. But we're going to take it as it comes. We just want to apply the fun we have together and apply it to our baby.'

'I go hook, line and sinker' for things, says Kate Winslet. For relationships, in work. She tells me that when she takes a role, the first thing that she does is ask that new character the Proust Questionnaire, so she can 'find out how the character will respond to things; it gets you right in there; all the way in'. So before we finish, I ask her a few of the questions on the questionnaire:

What are you most scared of? 'Oh, not many things you know. Let's think. Well, until I went on holiday recently I had a real fear of being in deep water. Of what was below the surface. I'd always have to turn round and go back. So I learnt to scuba dive - I have to face my fears - and now I feel fine and in control down there. I'm still scared of being on the surface, with all the depth under me. It's like a thin-ice thing I suppose.'

What is the trait you most dislike in your self? 'There should be lots of things. God, tricky. I think I do have a tendency to come up with lots of ideas about life and plans - wouldn't it be great if... - and then I don't get round to doing them. They're sometimes such good ideas too, I think: "God, you're clever to think of that." A procrastinator when it comes to life, though not with work.'

And the trait you most like in yourself? She replies at once: 'I am a good listener. I do listen to people and hear their problems, when friends have their knickers in a twist...' What is your idea of heaven? 'Probably something really basic. I know - breakfast in bed, after a really long lie-in. Oh God, I love it all. Croissants and toast and scrambled eggs, I adore scrambled eggs.'

And favourite smell? 'I have to say it is when I'm in the countryside and there's been rain, a storm. And the grass and earth smell so fresh, that's it, and now I sound like a hippy idiot again.' Later that evening she rings me to say that she knows what her really really favourite smell is: the smell of wood smoke. 'I don't know why, but it reminds me of my childhood. It makes me feel young again. It makes me feel happy.'

Holy Smoke is on general release from 31 March

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