Sensibility is the 'Real' Winslet
March 15, 1996

LONDON -- Kate Winslet's ripe impetuosity in Sense And Sensibility has made the young actress both an Academy Award nominee and a star.

As for the two traits of the title, she knows which one suits her. "I'm sensibility; I am, I am," the 20-year-old Winslet said over lunch in north London.

"My fundamental me, my real me, is much more sensibility," she said. "Otherwise, actually, why am I acting in all honesty? There's an element in all actors of getting to the root of certain emotions, digging around inside your soul and chucking things out.

"I still don't understand why I have this thing about wanting to act so much. But it was always my drive,and if I say I'm going to do something, I do it. I am so incredibly stubborn."

In her first film, Heavenly Creatures, Winslet drew audiences into the erotic fantasy-turned-murderous reality of an English teenager in 1950s New Zealand. Based on a true story, the film was a critical success and got a 1995 Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

In Sense And Sensibility - based on Jane Austen's first novel - Winslet plays the lovesick Marianne, middle sister of the financially squeezed Dashwood clan. She fiercely embraces the dictates of the heart against the "prudence and honor and duty" extolled by older sister Elinor (Emma Thompson).

Already the recipient of the Golden Globe award for best drama, Sense And Sensibility is up for seven Oscars on March 25, including best film, best actress and adapted screenplay (both for Thompson) and Winslet's own mention.

(Last month, the actress won the same award from the Screen Actors Guild.)

Winslet recently flew to Los Angeles to test for a film about the Titanic by James Cameron (The Terminator). She returned to London to continue filming her Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's new screen version of Hamlet.

She acknowledges she is at that point when anonymity starts to vanish. "It's not like it changes my behavior or anything like that," she said. "It's better to just ignore it and be who you are."

Winslet is the second of four children born in Reading, west of London, to an actor-father for whom, Winslet says, "things never really completely kicked off." Her mother is a qualified nanny and older sister Anna, 23, is also an actress.

Theatre school in neighboring Maidenhead led to a Sugar Puffs commercial, a short-lived sitcom called Get Back, her role in Heavenly Creatures and Sense And Sensibility.

She had never read Jane Austen before hearing of Marianne. But with the part came a grip on the character expressed with the impassioned intelligence of someone twice her age.

"Marianne is the victim of her own sensibility, which is the thing I found most touching about her," said Winslet. "She has been so untouched by the world that she knew no different but to be who she was, and she suffered for that," continued the actress, moved that "somebody could be as honest and be so generous with her heart and yet have it still broken."

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