Cosmopolitan
Charming, disarming Kate Winslet.
October 1996

By David Gritten

British actress Kate Winslet received critical notice for her performances in the films 'Heavenly Creatures' and 'Sense and Sensibility.' At age 21, she has also starred in 'Jude' and 'Hamlet' and is filming 'Titanic.' She has wanted to act since she was young.

When I think of everything that's happened to me in the last year, I feel I could write my autobiography already," Kate Winslet sighs. Given that she's only twenty-one, her plans are premature. But she has a point. Quite simply, she is the fastest-rising young actress in the movies; her ascent this year has been so mercurial, she can call to mind a new achievement, award, or milestone almost

Although adventurous moviegoers were richly rewarded by her haunting performance as a teenage murderess in the 1994 cult film Heavenly Creatures, she first burned her name into our collective consciousness as Jane Austen's impetuous, melodramatic heroine Marianne Dashwood in the film version of Sense and Sensibility. With reddish curls framing her round, innocent' arresting face, Winslet resembled a character in a Pre-Raphaelite painting; we watched, captivated. as Marianne scaled the heights of romantic ecstasy and trawled the emotional depths of rejection.

Winslet's performance won her a Golden Globe nomination, then an Oscar nomination--but even before the reviews for the film were in, she had made all the right moves to consolidate her career. She took the demanding role of willful, forthright Sue Bridehead in Jude, English director Michael Winterbottom's film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's bleak classic Victorian novel Jude the Obscure. And she jumped at Kenneth Branagh's invitation to play Ophelia, joining a stellar company of stage-trained thespians for the most extravagant gamble of Branagh's career--a four-hour movie of Hamlet, in which not one line of Shakespeare's text is cut.

It hasn't stopped there. Winslet has already started work in Mexico on her first Hollywood movie, Titanic--a one-hundred-million-dollar special-effects blockbuster from James Cameron, who brought us Aliens and the Terminator films. She plays a rich, unhappily engaged American girl who finds her first real love aboard the doomed cruise liner.

This all adds up to a stratospheric rise, and it would be understandable--predictable, even--if Winslet turned out to be grand, dismissive, or spoiled. After all, half of Hollywood wants to employ her. But instead, she is refreshingly down-to-earth, chatty, friendly -- and faintly bemused by the speed of her emergence. When I first meet her in a London hotel, she's dressed head to toe in black--a casual jacket, T-shirt, short skirt, tights, heavy Doc Martens boots. She cusses nonchalantly and rolls her own cigarettes. With her strong, regular features--soulful eyes. heavy eyebrows, full sensuous lips--she is undeniably attractive, but not in a way that would stop London traffic. She chatters on relentlessly. The new sensation in Hollywood? She reminds you more of a typical British college student, eking out a frugal living on a modest allowance.

She has not yet reamed the trick of sounding blase about her life. Here she is on the subject of the Golden Globes: "I heard I was nominated when I arrived at Ken Branagh's office for a production meeting. I threw myself on the floor and shouted, `I've got to ring my Mum!' And the awards themselves. I'd never been to a ceremony like that! I was going, `Oh my God, there's Clint and Travolta and Tarantino and Jodie Foster! There's Tom and Nicole! And Brad and Gwyneth!' I sat next to Alicia Silverstone, and we ended up sneaking off to the rest room for a quick cigarette. We swapped phone numbers and had a real giggle. Then I burst into tears when Sense and Sensibility won best film."

You can call Kate Winslet many things, but `jaded' is not among them. "Over the last few months," she says, wide-eyed, "things haven't really stopped. I sometimes ask myself, Is all this really happening to me?"

Well, yes, it is a reality that takes some getting used to. But her refusal to affect airs and graces stems directly from her upbringing. She is from acting stock; her grandparents ran the local repertory theater in Reading--a large town thirty miles west of London--where she grew up. Her uncle, Robert Bridges, played Bumble in the original West End production of the musical Oliver! Not unkindly, she calls her lather, Roger Winslet, "a struggling actor. But he's philosophical. He does work when he finds it. And because I grew up surrounded by actors who weren't constantly working, I don't put all my eggs in one basket now that I'm an actress. I carry that mentality with me."

So does her family, who, she says, treat her no differently now that she is famous: "It's a job to them, so they don't put me on a pedestal. There are four kids, and we're all treated the same. And why shouldn't we be? That's a healthy wire that's coursed all through my upbringing."

It's hard to imagine, but at the start of 1996, Winslet still lived (between films) in a modest terraced house near Reading's unlovely soccer stadium with her parents, older sister Anna, and younger siblings Beth and Josh.

Her love life seems to have been equally humdrum. She ruefully concedes that work pressures deep-sixed a romance with her long-time boyfriend last year. Then there were media rumors of an affair with handsome English actor Rufus Sewell, but the relationship apparently fizzled out. "Rufus and I are friends--this is true, honestly. He's not my boyfriend. We both decided we had too much work to do." Worse, that work was on different continents.

As you'd expect, her attitude toward love is worldly-wise for her years: "The most important thing about a relationship is discovering who you are in it. Because it's never a match1 made in heaven. It's never easy. That's why roles in slushy love stories don't interest me." She sighs. "I don't have a boyfriend. I need to get a life."

She has taken steps to do so. "I finally moved out of my parents' house," she says. "It was only fair to let my sister have her own room." This summer, she found her own place, a large London apartment that she shares with two girlfriends a makeup artist who worked on Jude and a Heavenly Creatures crew member.

Winslet finds communal life relaxed and enjoyable. if not terribly hedonistic. She likes listening to music, eating in, and shopping: "It was not a wild child," she says. "More of a granny stay-at-home." She insists she "never did the things other teenagers did. I've only been to three clubs in my entire life. That's the really sad thing. I don't know how to enjoy myself."

Her life has not been unclouded. She admits to a dark spell between Sense and Sensibility and Jude: "I was depressed and heavy in myself. Really heavy in myself." Happily, this phase seems to be over. as do the weight problems that clouded her teens. She has confessed that at school, her nickname was Blubber, and at fifteen, she weighed around one hundred eighty pounds. Her weight could fluctuate alarmingly, and she was unhappy when it soared.

She finally decided to take action when she appeared in a British TV drama as the daughter of a three-hundred-pound woman. She realized she'd been cast because it looked as if she could end up at that weight herself: "So I thought the time had come to stop silly diets and really change my attitude toward food." She finally embarked on a Weight Watchers diet with her mother, Sally, who also had weight problems.

Now, Winslet is stable at around one hundred thirty pounds and seems likely to stay that way. "I'm in physical training for Titanic now," she says with a hint of pride. "I need to get my strength up. There's a lot of action, a lot of running about in cold water. I'm a bit of a masochist, I suppose."

She left high school at age sixteen and decided to forgo college. "Since I was thirteen or fourteen, I've always felt older than I actually am," she notes. "Most of my friends are older than I. So I didn't want to stay on at school. I wanted to act, to get on with life, to be in the world of the working. And since then, I've had the most extraordinary education anyone could have the places I've been to, the people I've seen. It's been amazing. "

Winslet has indeed been too busy for a normal adolescence. Just eight days after her final exam at school, she landed a role on Get Buck, a British TV sitcom, and stayed for two seasons. She appeared in episodes of drama series, then landed Heavenly Creatures, which led to Sense and Sensibility. There are no gaps on her resume.

The actress is now shooting her fourth film almost back-to-back, and has devoted most of her spare waking time to working and promoting her career. If she has lacked anything in this last heady year, it's been the luxury of sitting back and taking stock of all that has happened to her.

"Life management has been the hardest thing," she admits. "I haven't allowed any time for myself. I've thought, I'm losing it here, I'm exhausted, I'm forgetting who I am. I know I have to have a life. I need it for my work and my head. Otherwise, I'm not going to do the job properly. I've always preached this for others, and suddenly, I realized, Kate, you're not practicing what you preach."

She then tells me she's just returned from an idyllic week away from work: she describes it as her major indulgence this year. It sounds simple enough she and a girlfriend threw some clothes into a suitcase and went off to a secluded rural cottage. "We rode bikes, took long walks, had conversations putting the world to rights, and read trashy magazines." she recalls. "I can't believe I've never before called a friend like that and said, `Come on, let's go off somewhere.' I really should have, but somehow, I skipped all that. There are few experiences in my life that were normal for a seventeen, eighteen-, nineteen-, or twenty-year-old."

This is demonstrably true. Few eighteen-year-olds are offered a leading role in a film, as Winslet was (Heavenly Creatures). Still fewer nineteen-year olds get to play in British acting's big leagues alongside talents like Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman. Winslet did and was widely lauded for her work in Sense and Sensibility.

Petrified at the outset of shooting, she remembers that "in the first week's rehearsals, there wasn't a single day I didn't go bright red and feel absolutely ridiculous about everything I was saying. I thought I was long-winded, repetitious. and stupid."

Worse was to come. "At the end of the first day's filming, I very timidly asked [director Ang Lee], `How was I?' And all he said was `You'll act better.' After that, sometimes he said, `Terrible. Terrible.'"

Still, she used steely resolve to land the role of Marianne. The film's producer. Lindsay Doran, originally envisaged her in a minor part that of Lucy Steele' eventually played by Imogen Stubbs. "But I thought, F--- that," Kate recalls. "I wanted to be Marianne, so she was the only character I would even talk to Lindsay about."

On the set, she developed a close friendship with Emma Thompson, who had written the script, based on Jane Austen's novel, and who played Elinor, the older, pragmatic Dashwood sister--Sense to Marianne's Sensibility. Ang Lee wanted the two actresses to hang out together off-set and behave like sisters, which they did.

The effect on Winslet was profound. Even now, fifteen months after shooting Sense and Sensibility, she retains many trademark Thompson mannerisms--self-deprecating anecdotes, rolling her own cigarettes, a stevedore's vocabulary, a hint of cockney in her speech, and a theatrical tendency to banish shades of gray from her conversation.

"We really cared about each other," she says simply. "We became like sisters and still are. We took care of each other's needs on the set and got along like a house on fire." Now, of course, Kate is talked of as a natural inheritor of roles that were once Thompson's natural preserve.

"Ah, the Winslet girl," says Thompson, adopting a schoolmarm's tone for comic effect. "She should be unbearable, shouldn't she? I mean, she's bright. And young. And talented. But the fact is, she's likable too."

Thompson also paid tribute to her in her published diaries, written while Sense and Sensibility was shot: "Kate looks a bit white. The bravest of the brave, that girl. I can't imagine what sort of state I would have been in at nineteen with the prospect of such a huge role in front of me. She is energized and open, realistic, intelligent, and tremendous fun."

Winslet might have rested on her laurels and nominations from that film but instead chose to embark on an even tougher one. "Jude was bloody hard work," she says now. "Unbelievably long hours. And I had so much to do as the only constant female in the story. Carrying that baggage alone was tough."

There was another hurdle to clear, in the form of her first nude scene, on a bed embracing British actor Christopher Eccleston, who plays Sue Bridehead's cousin Jude. It is a startling sequence, not least because her naked body is far more exposed than his.

She didn't feel exploited, though: "Not in the slightest. The scene was absolutely necessary and crucial--a real turning point in the story. And after the first half hour, it became a technical exercise to get the scene done. I just forgot I had no clothes on." Not that this prevented acute nerves beforehand: "I kept putting the scene out of my mind. And I didn't eat very much for a few days prior to it, to make sure I looked slim." (Obviously, the experience was not too traumatic--she did a nude scene in Branagh's Hamlet too.)

Winslet came away from Hamlet with a huge admiration for Branagh's zest for hard work--and it's no accident she respects this quality. "Kate is one of the hardest-working actors you'll ever meet," says a source on the movie. "She spends a long time working herself up to a scene, and she's very prepared. She's sincere, eager to please, openly delighted when she does a scene well. She'll have an extraordinary future."

One unanswered query is about her versatility; all her films to date have been period pieces. "People have said, 'Do you worry about doing so many costume dramas?' But these are choices I've made," she says. "I've been offered contemporary roles, but strong female parts like the ones I've played are rare--I feel lucky to have been considered. So many actors--English ones anyway--don't do films. In fact, some of them hardly ever work. So the worry factor about costume drama doesn't come into it. Hey, I'm working!"

There is something disarmingly touching about Kate Winslet. Perhaps it is her inability or unwillingness to censor herself, perhaps her decision to be so emotionally open. It's hard to harden your heart to someone who admits to dissolving into tears when she read the mere outline of the Titanic story--and immediately calling to say she wanted the role. "It's terribly moving," she says earnestly, and for a minute, it seems her eyes will fill with tears just at the thought.

Not everyone loves her in the British media, which has a notorious taste for cutting down homegrown successes. One woman writer found Winslet's openness irritating and said so: "The heart sinks," she wrote after a typically effusive Winslet outburst. What had the actress said to offend? She'd merely recounted a conversation with Emma Thompson: "I rang Emma and said "I've got to do a [expletive] nude scene and I'm terrified." And she said: 'Listen, babe, you'll love it. You'll feel so Liberated.' And I did." Well, there's the answer--this was an anecdote worthy of Thompson herself. As the writer went on to observe, "It was Emma Thompson who started it, this bizarre, overfrank style of interview, with lots of F and B words. . . false bonhomie and false south London accents."

Yet beneath Winslet's verbal mood swings and flowery thespian rhetoric is a well-meaning young woman trying to figure out a way to handle her newfound fame. She still shrinks from using her name to secure privileges, like landing a table at a hot restaurant. And she has confided to friends that she's alarmed some old acquaintances treat her differently now. In short, she must cope with the pressure of consensus that her future is not just bright but dazzling.

"I know," she says disbelievingly. "I sometimes stop and think, How lucky am l? It's absurd. I'm only twenty-one. But honestly," she adds, her voice becoming heartbreakingly earnest, "I never take a second for granted."

COPYRIGHT 1996 © Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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