Young Actress Rises to Meet Challenges
November 3, 1996

by Bob Strauss

Telling example of Kate Winslet's good fortune:

Earlier this year, when Kenneth Branagh was casting about for his soon-to-be-released, full-text film rendition of "Hamlet," he called the young actress and told her she had the plum part of Ophelia. No auditions, not even a meeting -- nor any apparent rancor that she'd just played the youngest sister of Branagh's ex-wife in Emma Thompson's Oscar-winning adaptation of "Sense and Sensibility."

Fine, you say. Winslet is an excellent actress regardless of her age (she just turned 21). Besides her own Academy Award-nominated "Sense" performance, she had painted an indelible portrait of teenage pathology in the acclaimed true-crime story "Heavenly Creatures." But the "Hamlet" story gets better.

"Because of the faith that he must have had in me, I just thought, 'Oh, my God. I'd better come up with the goods then, haven't I?' " Winslet said in the neurosis-laden British speed-speak that's already become something of a trademark. "It's Shakespeare, and all the fears that go with that. I don't understand it and all of those things, and that was really scary. But getting there, Day One, I realized that everybody was even more nervous than I was. It really made for a great atmosphere."

This seems to be the Winslet method in a nutshell: brilliant casting luck followed by abject insecurity, resulting in work that appears utterly confident, regardless of how difficult.

And none of her roles has been easy. Perhaps the least so is that of Sue Bridehead, the ahead-of-her-time tragic heroine of Thomas Hardy's final novel, Jude the Obscure. Adapted to the screen and currently in theaters under the title "Jude" (in its opening weekend in Chicago at the Fine Arts), this 19th century tale of rebellion, illicit passion and outrageous misfortune not only presented the actress with one of the more complicated women in English literature, but also with one she couldn't care for very easily.

"Sue was always fighting, but for what? You can't work out what it was that Sue really wanted," Winslet said of the young woman who spouted decidedly non-Victorian feminist rhetoric, vehemently questioned religion and other social conventions, and ultimately left her husband for the true love of her life, her cousin Jude Fawley (Christopher Eccleston of "Shallow Grave" notoriety). "I don't think she had any agenda. She was just determined to say her piece and to keep on saying her piece until something changed. Then I think that got a bit screwed up by the fact that she realized she was falling in love with Jude, but she just couldn't admit that to herself.

"She was manipulative, but I think that stemmed from fear," Winslet added, trying to find some sympathy for a character whose ultimate fate few would wish on their most mortal enemy. "It was an insecurity thing. I think Sue was very, very vulnerable. It was absolutely ridiculous; she would have been so much happier if she'd just said, 'Look, I love you. Let's have this life together.'"

While admitting that the darker aspects of Sue were quite difficult to come by ("It was hell, because of the depth and the rather alien qualities of the emotions"), Winslet also revealed that behavioral extremes are what drew her to "Jude" and most of her other films.

"I can't really explain why I love acting so much, but maybe it's kind of a greedy thing," she said, brushing back her burnt orange hair. "When you hit such highs and lows with emotion, at the end of the day you've been really indulgent. Sobbing your heart out for hours and hours on end is pretty indulgent. But that's sort of the challenge, too; to go into other worlds, wanting to create them in a way that is truthful and profound."

Winslet claims she saves her indulgences for work. Back home in England, she avoids the clubs-and-drugs youth scene and doesn't date much.

"I, in many ways, wouldn't mind a relationship," she said with a shrug. "But in all honesty I haven't had the time to socialize and find somebody. Besides, it wouldn't be fair on the other person or me because I'm away working so much of the time."

All this mature sensibleness is the result of a permissive upbringing. Winslet's parents, Roger and Sally, are theater folks who have eked out their living on the experimental fringe and raised their daughters to be free spirits.

"Not anymore, but certainly when we were growing up, my mum and dad were hippies," she recalled fondly. "We'd go to music and dance festivals with them, run around in dirty little dresses with no shoes, get really scruffy and just be what we were: kids.

"And they've continued to just allow us to be who we are, whatever that might be, good or bad," Winslet continued. "They've never been the kind of parents who said, 'Be in by 11, and if you're five minutes late, you're grounded.' "

But rather than take that as a cue to run wild, Winslet started working in commercials at the age of 13. She hasn't really stopped since, partly because of what she acknowledges is one of the most impressive runs of luck a young actress has enjoyed since the heyday of Julia Roberts.

"Acting is just so much in my blood; it's just extraordinary to me that I've been lucky enough to have fairly consistent work like I have had for the last three years," she said. "There are times when I think, 'God, I'm really tired, and I wouldn't mind stopping for a bit.' But then I feel bad that I want to stop, because I'm so lucky to be working in the first place."

And work she does. Winslet has just begun filming "Titanic," the latest mega-movie from James Cameron, a director notorious for running actors ragged. Co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio, it's her first big Hollywood production, and quite possibly the one that will bring Winslet the stardom and riches she claims to eschew.

But like most Cameron productions (the "Terminator" pictures, "Abyss," "True Lies"), this love story set on the doomed ocean liner is something of a struggle simply to survive. There was a mass food poisoning incident during some preliminary filming in Canada late last summer.

And after only a few weeks at the main shooting location on Mexico's Baja coast, the actress admits that she's already a mass of bruises.

"We were doing a scene the other day where my character rescues Leonardo's, who's been handcuffed to a drainpipe four decks below while the ship is going down," she explained. "I was up to my chest in water, with an ax, trying to hack him free. I banged through this water trying to move drawers out of the way, amid floating tables and chairs and God knows what.

"There's this frantic side to it, of course -- the water's rising -- but that meant I just couldn't think about what I was actually doing in terms of my body and everything that was crashing into it. When I got home and undressed, I was all black and blue."

If that's good luck, then so was copping tickets for the Titanic's maiden voyage. Still, not even tons of water appear capable of dousing Kate Winslet's burning desire to push her acting career ever-forward, ever-harder.

"I've had a number of extraordinary roles in a time when there are really so few good roles for women," she said. "When these scripts are presented to me, it's just impossible for me to turn my back on them. Because I've so got that fire inside of me, I've so got to be a part of a good film, and I'm just absolutely determined to do that. I'll do anything I possibly can to try and make it happen."

Bob Strauss is the film critic of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Source: The Chicago Sun-Times