Harper's Bazaar

Breaking the Waves

July 1997

By Richard Rayner

Young British actress Kate Winslet brings her oceans of talent and passion to a starring role in the most expensive movie ever made: The upcoming blockbuster Titanic. Richared Rayner meets the girl most likely....

Kate Winslet meets me at the door of her New York hotel suite, an expression of excited apology on her face. "Mum and Dad will be back at 3:30. Is that okay? I thought perhaps you'd like to meet them." This is not quite what you expect from a movie star on the rise. But Winslet doesn't behave like someone on the brink of huge fame, and she doesn't exactly look the part, either: She wears clumpy Harley Davidson boots, a flowing black skirt, and a T-shirt with a pink cardigan. Her legs are still covered in bruises from the pounding they took during the shoot for Titanic director James Cameron's $180 million epic about the ship that went bump in the night.

She is lovely to look at. Her eyes are the palest blue, and her lips have something of Monroe's fullness. Her skin, however, is her most extraordinary feature, a pale, delicate parchment beneath which you can sense the blood swimming. She seems to glow.

Of course, many of us already know and admire Winslet: She's the classic English beauty who can't repress her full-on passion, the voluptuous period babe very deservedly nominated for an Oscar for her performance in 1995's Sense and Sensibility. But now we are all about to get to know her very well indeed, since her first major Hollywood outing happens to be not a romantic comedy or another routine shoot 'em up, but one of the biggest studio flicks ever, directed by the man who ranks right after Steven Spielberg in the A-list pecking order. What the heck--some people get all the breaks, though this one carries a considerable risk: If Titanic sinks like its real-life namesake, then Winslet's career will inevitably suffer. And she's soon to be clobbered by another unthinkable iceberg: simultaneous release in a couple thousand movie theaters; she's poised for superstardom the way Julia Ormond seemed to be after Legends of the Fall. No wonder she seems a little vulnerable.

Hence the presence of Winslet's parents. It's a treat for them, since they've never seen New York before. And Winslet still relies on them to ground her. This seems simultaneously immature--she's 21, after all--and somehow very wise and self-aware, since any movie career is a treacherous path through a jungle of whirling choices and blinding hype. You probably need whatever decent advice you can get.

As the interview gets underway, Winslet continues to fly a vivid conversational kite about the importance of her roots. She was born and raised--and until recently still lived--in a small house in Reading, an entirely unmemorable town in the south of England, about halfway between London and Oxford. But if the locale was nondescript, her family provided plenty of splashy color. They didn't prepare her for an acting career so much as encode it in that blushing blood of hers. She comes from generations of aspiring thespians. "On my dad's side, there were twin sisters who were part of a vaudeville troop. On my mum's side, my grandparents ran a repertory theater. My grandfather--you'll die when you hear this--was an actor but also a dentist, and ran his practice from home." Her uncle appeared in the original West End production of the musical Oliver;

Her father and her two sisters act, all in fairly small-time productions. Winslet, in contrast, is making it in the way a part of her always dreamed of. She remembers being cast as Mary in her school nativity play, her first starring role, at the age of five, "a deeply serious event that made me want to cry because I was so happy," she says.

To this background and her very real talent is added energy, passion, and an un-English degree of ambition. In the past, Winslet hasn't wooed directors so much as taken them by the throats, calling them and badgering them into handing her the parts in question. "The worst thing that's going to happen is that someone's going to think I'm a complete idiot, and I don't care. I really don't care; I just want them to know that I really want this job. I can really do this job." To snag Titanic and Cameron, she acted the nuttily driven Englishwoman. "I called him--I think he was in his car on the freeway--and said, 'You don't understand. I have to do this film. You cannot possibly cast anyone else."' When Cameron informed her that Titanic would be brutally hard and even dangerous work, she pumped her hand in the air, shouting, "Let's go for it!" Cameron--who is among the most strong-willed and least easily swayed of directors, the original 800-pound gorilla you don't want to get in a cage with--was impressed. It's certainly not the way they teach you to behave at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Winslet didn't go there, or to any of the other big London drama schools. "Blah-da-blahde-bullshit," she says. Her education as an actor came largely through doing commercials and playing an assortment of spoiled little rich girls in Thatcher-era Brit sitcoms. Nonetheless, she talks enough about not having been to college to make you wonder if she's got a chip on her shoulder about the subject; she's not sur e whether she's missed out or not.

Winslet is funny and without guile. She hits you with conversation that overwhelms before it charms. "I don't know where my drive comes from, really. I guess it's a family thing--we're all so bloody romantic. I don't just see a green tree. It's, 'Oh, my God, it's a green tree. Oh, my God, I feel like I've been born again,' you know. We're all so like that, and I know that as an actor, I do get so much energy and strength and this feeling that I can throw myself outside myself. Every day on Sense and Sensibility I would wake up at 5:30 in the morning in a little country-house hotel on the Devonshire coast, and we would walk to work, Emma Thompson and I. We'd walk to the end of the lane, the cows would be going in to be milked, the hedge was really high on one side, and we'd get to the coastal road and we'd just skip and stomp and sing along that road to work. I'd be thinking, I just love this, this is brilliant."

Maybe someone could halt this hurricane of words, probably the same guy who's going to dissuade Dennis Rodman from putting on women's clothes. Not me: I'm sitting there like the man in the Maxell ad, holding on to the arms of my chair, hair whipped back, while Winslet sips at mineral water and talks and talks and smokes constantly, either the Camels left behind by the publicity guy or ones she rolls herself, occasionally pausing to light up again or pick a strand of tobacco from her tongue.

"I'm lucky that since I was about 12 or 13 years old, I've been totally financially independent of my family," she says. "And I've never had tremendous money worries." Still, even after her first film, the 1994 New Zealand movie Heavenly Creatures, unsure when she'd get the next gig, she went to work in a London delicatessen. "I'd do that again," she goes on. "I would, absolutely would. I've got to be doing something. I've got to make it happen. I can't sit back and hope that things are going to be going my way, everything lovely, left, right, and center."

Her emotional balance she attributes not only to her family but also to a number of friendships with people older than herself, which may have helped her develop those precocious professional smarts. Winslet knows she's been lucky and seems to understand that all this could go away, so for the moment she's trying to enjoy the frills of celebrity--the limos, the hotels, the tickets for that hot, sold-out show--without letting their importance get out of hand.

Charmingly, she's still starstruck, new enough to fame to be beguiled by its magnetism in others. She's amused by her friend Leonardo DiCaprio, who would look at her while they were filming Titanic and say, "No, really--do you think I'm good-looking?" She's envious of Nicole Kidman, so gorgeous and so thin. (Winslet says she has been "to hell and back" with her weight. At age 16, she weighed 185 pounds; now she swims a mile a day.) She's definitely unembarrassed for having gushed at Jodie Foster during the Golden Globes and is blown away by Whoopi Goldberg, who told her, "I see a lot of young actresses, but you're it, girl. Hold on to who you are. Well, that's the trick, isn't it? Winslet describes her trip to the Oscars as though it were an episode of The Waltons, with her mother standing on her dress when they arrived and Kate herself sitting four feet away from John Travolta, the man she would have died for when, as a young girl, she saw him in Grease.

"Yeah, all that was fun," she says. "But it's not quite real, is it? In the way that L.A. isn't quite real. I feel a little mad whenever I go there."

Such a statement, or one very like it, has probably been made by every performer who ever stepped into the warped mirror of fame Winslet now finds herself halfway through. But there is something gritty and real about Winslet, and something sympathetic, and you hope that against the odds she can hold on to those qualities, maybe even turn them into her selling points.

Her arrival on the scene has been so explosive and assured that only now is her nature as a performer beginning to emerge. She was a lesbian murderess in Heavenly Creatures; a high-flying romantic as Marianne Dashwood, sister to Emma Thompson's Elinor, in Sense and Sensibility; the tragic Sue Bridehead in Jude; an exemplary Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. These aren't exactly girl-next-door roles, not unless your neighbors are the Addams family or you happen to live on the same block as the house of Atreus. Her choices suggest commitment to a career as an actor rather than as a star. This, too, is a function of her character. Winslet knows no other way than to come at you with lights blazing: She's a middle-class English rose infected with Method mania, who doesn't believe she's done a proper day's work unless she feels wrung out at the end of it. She talks with almost wistful longing about Cameron plunging her into 60-degree water. "It's my job to create something so hon! est that it can draw anyone in," she says. "That you'll watch this and think, Yes, that's what it might be like to go down in freezing water. I don't know whether I'm believable or not--that's for the audience to say--but I felt it. I never commit to a role unless I can give it 150,000 percent."

In Titanic she's a snooty Philadelphia beauty on the brink of an arranged marriage who falls for a member of the underclass, in the heavily eyebrowed shape of DiCaprio. Then the iceberg intrudes, and she has to venture down six flooded decks to get him out. They've got my money already. Cameron, who on the one hand makes such macho movies, tends to be very generous to the screen presence of his actresses--ask Sigourney Weaver, whom he directed in Aliens. During the climactic scenes in Titanic, Winslet gets to play the action heroine, the girl who does impossibly dangerous things to rescue her guy, rather than the other way around.

Suddenly there's a fuss at the door, and Winslet's parents duly enter as promised, hot and excited after a walk down Park Avenue to Grand Central station and impressed that New Yorkers, though brisk, seem so full of life, up for anything. The Winslets strike you as being a little that way themselves: bubbly and almost resolutely ordinary, not bothering to call room service for extra cups, but instead pouring their coffee in glasses they've fetched from the bathroom. They've raised Kate without airs or graces.

All the same, you wonder how she'll react when, after Titanic, she starts being recognized in the street. Whether the movie is a smash or a fiasco, it's certain to be big, huge. Her professional innocence is about to disappear for good at an age when most of us are trying to figure out just what it is we want to do. Her attitude is as level and as purposetul as those biker boots, but perhaps a little wistful, too. "Sometimes I think, God, I should be going out and going to pubs and getting drunk and smoking lots of drugs," she says. But that's not me. I'm resigned to the fact. It's tried and tested, done and dusted. One-night stands? Just not happening. I do feel I'm very much older than I am."

The next day, I meet her again, at the downtown studio where she's being photographed for this magazine. She wears a black skirt, a black jacket, and a white cotton blouse, and her bare legs are tucked into loafers. It's a different and more pensive Winslet--actually, a still excited but rather worried Winslet. She heard this morning that she's been called to an interview with Woody Allen, a cold audition of the type she rarely has to subject herself to anymore. Her agent has told her that Allen might stare at her for five minutes and say nothing. He might take a Polaroid or ask her to read a scene. He might, on the other hand, be brilliantly funny and charming. None of these possibilities is predictable, and none of them will have any obvious bearing on whether she will get the part. Nobody knows what the film is about. Nobody knows who the characters are. It's the usual Allen thing, but being invited to meet him in his offices at the Beekman is the cinematic equivalent of Don Corleone's offer that can't be refused. "I can't believe it. I'm so nervous," Winslet says, literally chewing on her lip.

Heading uptown in the limo, she talks about how she'd love to play comedy. She admires Allen, of course, and Whoopi Goldberg and the giddy balance Jim Carrey gives to things. Unlike most actors these days, she has no desire to direct. "Because I know that I myself very much need to be directed," she says. "I don't know exactly what I'm doing all the time. I can't stand outside myself and look in at what I'm doing. I very much need structuring." She credits Heavenly Creatures' Peter Jackson with having opened her up, and Ang Lee with being tough and calming her down on Sense and Sensibility. Jude director Michael Winterbottom taught her the importance of trivia, the everyday detail, while Branagh climbed into her guts and did every scene with her. Listening to her praising the directors she's worked with, you're reminded both of how little work Winslet has done in film and of how outstanding it's all been.

At the corner of 63rd and Park, outside the Beekman, Winslet suddenly looks very young, confused and even a little dazed about this issue of who she is and why the world seems to love her so much. Then she pauses, feet planted on the sidewalk. She takes a deep breath, drawing on her inner resources, imagining herself in the English countryside, visibly steeling herself before turning into the building, sure that she has the required talent and sheer will to make Woody Allen give her the bloody part.

Source: Harper's Bazaar