Now that we have called off the war with Iraq for a few months, perhaps we can bring ourselves to be even more grown-up and declare a moratorium on attacks on Kate Winslet. Since the actress turned up at the premiere of Titanic in a gauzy dress, looking like a wonderful, voluptuous mermaid, the weight of Kate has generated a thousand column inches. Last week, one newspaper found a photo of her performing in a school play and gleefully headlined it "Chubby!" Another snapped her getting off Concorde in groovy, comfortable clothes - big boots, short skirt revealing a healthy slab of thigh - and gave her a lecture about looking hideous. (Presumably, the female reporter concerned always travels in Chanel and pearls?)

Why all this appalling spitefulness? To the 22-year-old, who was nicknamed "Blubber" at stage school, and embarked on diets so ferocious they made her faint, it must feel like a carton of Saxa being poured into a gaping wound. What's more, it comes at a time when we should be shouting her achievements from the rooftops.

Kate Winslet is that simple, miraculous thing: a great actress. Since Heavenly Creatures, in which she played a teenager so besotted with another that she incites her to murder, Kate has shown us how a nice, no-nonsense girl from Berkshire can transform herself into passion's slave. Think of her Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, breathing rapturous plausibility into a romantic dope, or of her Rose in Titanic, blooming and growing in the warmth of Leo Di Caprio's love.

Many women I know are shocked by the treatment meted out to Kate Winslet. We don't understand how the media can lament the pain of anorexia one day and lampoon a size 14 the next. We feel that the actress is a fantastic role model for our daughters - a real female with a proper bosom, a proper bottom and a proper perspective on the suffocating vanity that cuts off oxygen to the brains of so many in her trade.

Unlike Kate Moss, who commands a devoted Press for beauty that is a trick of nature, Kate Winslet has perfected the elusive knack of making loveliness out of art. Long after the supermodels are forgotten in their skinny graves, her ample, life-affirming radiance will shine out wherever movies are still shown. If she wins the Oscar on 23 March she will richly deserve it. Whether we deserve to hail her as Our Girl on that night, I very much doubt.