Kiss Me Kate
October, 1996

A murderess in Heavenly Creatures and Oscar-nominated for Sense and Sensibility, is Kate Winslet heading for the big time?

When she was a little girl, Kate Winslet [sic] used to get up very early in the morning. From the age of three she would rise at 5am and quietly tramp down the stairs of her parents' modest terraced house in Reading, turn on the radio or maybe breakfast TV at a low volume and make herself something to eat, relishing the clandestine solitude of the new morning. Right up to her teens, when any normal teenager would be going out until dawn, raving away in some sticky-floored warehouse, young Kate would put the early hours to more introspective, less gregarious use. "I've always loved getting up early There's a certain... secrecy I like about it," she decides.

She's still a morning person. Indeed, Kate Winslet is the only actress this reporter has ever interviewed at 7.30am. As we travel to Shepperton Studios in the back of a car, I'm bleary-eyed, slowly warming up like an old telly, while she's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a chatty whippersnapper rolling her own stogies.

She'd be good on Radio 4's Just A Minute, would Kate. Once she starts talking there is no stopping her. Digression can't interrupt her breathless flow of anecdotes and stories. And while she might speak fluent luvvie half the time, bless her, it would certainly take a harder man than I not to be captivated by her.

As she settles in to the construction of her first Rizla job of the day, she pulls her bare feet up on to the seat so she can sit cross envelope of auld fella's tobacco nestling in the lap of her dungaree shorts, gushing away at will. And like an apprentice Em (Thompson) she mixes toilet humour with trauma, stories of her bowels and bladder with pass-notes deconstructions of the modern classics she's been filming. Kate will turn 21 in a few weeks time, but coming to the official end of her youth won't bother her at all. In fact, she's rather looking forward to it.

There was no My Guy or Just Seventeen for Kate. No Top Of The Pops or MTV. During her adolescence she was always more interested in books than television. "The funny thing is I've always felt a lot older than my years," she says. "I actually like getting older. Every time I have a birthday and I get to be another year older, I think 'Ooh yes, that feels a bit better. This jacket fits a little more snugly now."' Accordingly, for somebody who feels old she also feels rather fatigued. Two years of virtual non-stop work has taken its toll on her. First Heavenly Creatures, then on to Sense And Sensibility (with all its related awards ceremonies), hardly a break before dude (Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Jude The Obscure), Ken Branagh's Hamlet after that and now James Cameron's new version of Titanic. But then you would feel world-weary if your life was as intense as young Kate's.

She deals only with light and shade, exuberance or exasperation, triumph or tragedy There is no room for moderation in her world. "Just the best thing ever" is used frequently "Fuck off", when, "No, thank you very much" would have sufficed. Talking to her one is reminded of a flashback scene in Annie Hall when Annie is looking back at a few of her partners before Woody Allen's Alvy showed up. One, a particularly earnest thesp, tells young Annie, "When I die I want to be torn apart by wild animals." "Eaten alive by squirrels," counters Alvy.

"Do you know...?" says Kate at one point, "I am only 20 years old but if I think about all the things I've done, all the places I've been, all the people I've met, the emotions I've experienced and the journeys I've been on, I could probably write my autobiography right now." There then follows a rather pregnant pause as she reconsiders. "But I wouldn't do it," she sighs. "Because if I did, I'd get called a pretentious bitch from hell, wouldn't I?"

According to Kate, the Winslet household was a model of stability. Her actor dad, Roger, her mum, Sally, and her two sisters and brother grew up in a terraced house on a main road in Reading. "My family are the kind of people who when they say, 'God, you're really getting on my nerves,' they actually mean, 'Oh, God, I love you so much,"' says Kate. "The other day one of my friends told me that she had never told her dad that she loved him. I cried and cried when I heard that -- it was just so alien to me."

Overweight as a child ("I was fat," she says. "Very fat..."), Kate suffered from a lack of confidence which compacted her intense attitude. She distanced herself from her school friends and became rather self-centred. "Well, very within myself would be more accurate," she says. Even her school nativity play made a profound impression on her. "Being cast as the Virgin Mary was my first acting buzz, if you like. I was only five years old but I took it very, very seriously I remember really, really being Mary. Really, really feeling it," she says, not a trace of irony in her tone, the skin of her pretty, round face taut at the memory. "I was absolutely thrilled to be involved and I knew then that I wanted to be an actress."

Acknowledging her desire to tread the boards, her parents bundled young Kate off to Redroofs theatre school in Maidenhead. She never settled, though. "It was a bit too 'singy and dancey' for me," she says. Instead, she buckled down to her GCSEs, passed with flying colours and supplemented her pocket money with odd jobs like an appearance in a Sugar Puffs commercial. Eight days after she left Redroofs, she landed a part in a TV sitcom, Get Back.

Her first film was the well-received, arty Heavenly Creatures in 1994. Suitably hysterical and intense, it was the perfect springboard for Winslet's career, but it was her valuable contribution to Austen fever that found her winning the hearts of cinema-goers around the world. Despite describing herself as "fairly bookish", Kate had never heard of Sense And Sensibility nor, indeed, come across its author, Jane Austen when--aged only 18--she was offered the role as the impetuous Marianne Dashwood alongside Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson.

Kate cried when she got the part. She cried virtually every day while on set, as well. Cried too when she was nominated for the Oscar for best actress for her role. However, she cried even more profusely when the production wrapped. "I had the best time making that film. An absolute ball," she says. "I just didn't want it to end." Much to the delight of director Ang Lee, Winslet and Emma Thompson, cast as the Dashwood sisters on screen, bonded like real sisters off it.

Although there was some 15 years difference in their ages, it's easy to see why Kate and Em hit it off big-time. Both share the same self-deprecating tendencies, coarse sense of humour, a propensity for four-letter words and emotionally charged outbursts. Perhaps more poignantly, during the filming of Sense And Sensibility, both women were having rather pronounced man trouble. Thompson had parted company with Kenneth Branagh and was watching the minutiae of their relationship being plastered all over the tabloids. Winslet, meanwhile, had also split with her partner. Recently engaged to her boyfriend, she had lived through the horror of a subsequent discovery that he was suffering from cancer. They broke off the engagement the day he started his chemotherapy. Perhaps fortunately, Kate's star was still in the early stages of ascendancy and the papers never got hold of the story. They made up for it by splashing her brief but fierce affair with actor Rufus Sewell all over their pages--"Sewell's Jewel" The Sun called her. She is currently single.

Winslet had no such sisterly security to fall back on when she made her latest offering, Jude. Although Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen might share shelf-space in many living rooms, there are few similarities in the styles of either author and the director's alarmingly bleak approach addresses this. Where Sense And Sensibility was frothy and charming, a definitive exercise in costume drama, Jude is harsh and cruel. A cold but stirring film, Jude focuses on the tribulations of its central characters, Sue Bridehead--played by Winslet--and Jude Fawley -- brilliantly portrayed by Christopher Eccleston, last seen in Shallow Grave and Our Friends In The North. Jude takes little time out to seduce its audience with rolling hills and vales or bustles and breeches. Similarly, the language is un-starchy, un-flowery, pure estuary. Close your eyes and you could be listening to a contemporary drama. The photography is stunning, the acting superb and the ending brutally unhappy. The Americans are going to hate it.

Justifiably Winslet is particularly proud of the film, but Hardy's bitter tale of Jude and his ill-fated love affairs was bound to have a big effect on her. "I would go home at the end of a day's filming feeling like shit. I would have to unload so much crappy emotion otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep. The fact that I was on my own for long periods of time also meant that all the paranoia that I always have on a film was aggerated. You know: I'm crap, I can't act, I'm fat. I had to sit down and really think, 'How can I turn all this to my advantage?"' She wasn't too enamoured by Sue Bridehead (confused, frightened, manipulative) either. "I read the book and thought, this girl really pisses me off." Before filming started, the actors had to prepare by watching Three Colours: Blue, "because of the bizarre manifestations of emotions that you experience when you are bereaving" and Truffaut's Jules Et Jim, "because of that bizarre love triangle". But nothing could prepare Winslet for her first nude performances.

The two most startling scenes in the film (aside from the traumatic ending) both find Winslet naked. Firstly the clumsy fumblings of a girl experiencing sexual intercourse for the first time ("When I first read the script I thought it was the best sex scene, ever," she says. "You know, really unerotic and awkward.") Then later on, a woman encountering childbirth, blood pouring from between her legs, screams caterwauling from the depths of her lungs. The latter was Winslet's favourite.

"I had to be fitted with this prosthetic, which was wonderful," she says, grinning broadly. "God, I loved being fitted for it. I had to have this cast around my tummy and vagina area, so what they did was put cream all over so that it didn't stick. I had these three gorgeous men smearing Nivea all over my bottom, all over my tummy. All over... well, everywhere." The shot was a one-off, with no opportunity for a second attempt. Moments before the take, Kate ordered a cappuccino. "Two minutes later, 'Oh, shit, I need a wee, which I can't have, of course.' Five hours later, I looked down and my stomach actually looked like it was pregnant because it was so full of piss."

Things went from bad to worse during the virtual birth. In order to achieve that authentic labour pain rasp in her screams, Kate had borrowed some childbirth videos from the BBC's library. She practiced her screams long and hard so that the wailing that followed on set was real scary Hammer horror stuff. "When we started filming I was screaming myself absolutely hoarse. Then I suddenly remembered I was going to The Golden Globe awards that evening. I thought to myself, 'Shit, I hope I don't win the bloody thing' because I'd lost my voice and wouldn't be able to give a speech." Miss Dashwood, really.

Her excretory system took a further battering when she landed the role of Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. "My agent just called me up and said, 'Darling, Ophelia.' I said, 'What the fuck are you on about?' He just said, 'Ophelia, darling. Ophelia."' She called Ken later that day. "I was so stressed out. I said, 'Thanks very much, I'm really constipated now."' Her jocularity was followed swiftly by despair. "I became hysterical. I told Ken Branagh that I couldn't do it. He said, 'Why on earth not?' Because it was Shakespeare, because it was Ken Branagh. He said, 'Shut up you silly cow. Of course you can do it.' He explained to me that Shakespeare was a foreign language, but once you mastered it, it became completely natural. Ken Branagh can actually speak fluent Shakespeare, you know. He knows how to make it sound real and alive. It's amazing."

Her next concern is Titanic, where she'll star alongside Leonardo di Caprio ("which is the best news ever") in a James Cameron film which promises to merge the charm and drama of the original 1953 disaster epic with the hifalutin razzle-dazzle of Cameron's The Abyss and Terminator 2. But before shooting starts, Britain's finest young actress needs urgent schooling in a basic human skill. Relaxation. "I have to be doing something," she says. "Constantly. I have to have everything organised and constantly moving along. At the moment I'm trying to teach myself how to relax... usually by reading a copy of Hello! on the loo."

Winslet had a plan last year. During the summer of 1996 she was going to kick back for a while. She was going to go on holiday or, failing that, buy some stuff for her new flat. Instead she went from one job to the next, from one round of publicity junkets to another, and her plan never came to fruition. But she can dream. "At some stage I'm going to have to say, 'Right, that's it. I'm stopping for a bit now.' I'm going to go off on my own for a bit. Maybe spend a few months in Spain," she says, smiling at the thought of leaving the thespian loop for a while. "You know, travel economy, that kind of thing"

Source: Arena Magazine