"A Rose in Bloom"

by Simon Braund
Empire Magazine (UK)- March 1999

 

Awards, weddings, diets, stalkers, sexy lists, and that ship called Titanic. None shone brighter in 1998 than Kate Winslet. In 1999 she travels to the heart of the Sahara for Hideous Kinky. Which is where Simon Braund caught up with her.

There can't be many places four hours' flying time from London that deliver as vivid a culture shock as Marrakech. Even the "new" part, built by the French during their colonial tenure, has the unfamiliar, duty orange glow of a desert city far from home. But pass through one of the vast keyhole arches into the Medina -- the old town, an enclave of tradition partitioned from the modern world by massive fortified walls -- and it's like stepping into a different century. A medieval labyrinth of dark streets, passageways and covered markets, teeming with donkey carts, shrouded figures and incongruous, dilapidated mopeds, give on to shady courtyards and lush, walled gardens. The noise and the smell and the unsettling dearth of light are powerfully, overwhelmingly alien to any Brit.

The location set of Hideous Kinky -- director Gillies MacKinnon's adaptation of the Esther Freud novel -- is beautiful, balconied courtyard reached through a small door built into huge wooden gates of unguessable age. It's surrounded on two levels by tiny, cell-like rooms, the workshops and homes of the artisans who live here. Many of them act as extras in the scenes shot in the courtyard. Braziers burning blocks of incense billow sweet, fragrant smoke into the air. It mingles with the myriad odours of the town -- fruit and food and animal dung in the streets. Kate Winslet, who plays Julia, a young woman who comes to Morocco seeking spiritual enlightenment with her two young daughters, is rehearsing a scene outside the courtyard's single toilet--an evil smelling shed which is the only facility in the place when the film folk aren't in town. Wearing a bright pink ethnic shirt she's holding a stripy towel and a tube of toothpaste. She looks dazzlingly out of place among the Moroccan extras dressed in jellabas and kaftans. It's unreal, magical. Another world. And, of course, everything that augurs a monumental attack of the shits.

Kate Winslet is only too aware of this. The 23-year-old "Finest Actress Of Her Generation" and "Most Desirable Body In The World" has just returned from London where crippling dose of Montezuma's revenge kept here away from the royal premiere of Titanic, the James Cameron film about a big boat that sinks. And despite press reports of a mere "stomach upset" she was very poorly indeed. Today, carrying a few well-publicized extra pounds and without a discernible trace of makeup, she looks radiant, the picture of rude health. But appearances to the contrary, all is not lovely downstairs.

"I still feel very shaky and my stomach is not back to normal yet," she says, settling herself onto a stool in a doorway of the courtyard. Some smouldering frankincense near by sends wisps of smoke drifting across her face. She pounces a Marlboro Light.

"Apparently I had amoebic dysentery, which can be quite serious. I was speaking to Emma Thompson recently—I hadn't spoken to her for ages and we had a lovely chat—and she told me that she'd researched a character once who had amoebic dysentery so she knew a lot about it. Apparently, it never leaves your body so my stomach is going to be much weaker than it was before, which is a bit of a pain."

Since her 1994 screen debut as a homicidal teen in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Winslet has attracted a deluge of prestigious awards and gushing critical acclaim—she was voted Best Actress at the 1995 Toronto Film Festival for Creatures, won a BAFTA, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a London Evening Standard Film Award and the coveted Empire BestActressAward for Hamlet and during her relatively brief film career has been nominated for two Oscars and two Golden Globes. She has also featured in the upper reaches of every Most Beautiful Person/Sexiest Actress list compiled in the last four years. And since the release of the Big Boat Film her only serious rival for blanket media coverage has been Bill Clinton's cock—it has even been alleged that Monika Lewinsky's antics with Clinton stemmed from her desire to be like Rose DeWitt Bukater, Winslet's character in the Big Boat Film—substituting the Oval Office for a vintage Renault in the cargo hold of the doomed liner, naturally. She was forced to move house last year by her very own celebrity stalker and the subject of her fluctuating weight has filled more tabloid pages than George Michael's lavatorial indiscretions and Liam Gallagher's wobbly marriage put together.

But in the face of it all, she has retained a disarming, almost miraculous air of normality. The impression is that her phenomenal success is a source of near constant amazement and that she regards here starring role opposite the world's most lionised ladyboy lookalike in the Biggest Film Of all Time with thrilled bemusement.

"It feels like a complete joke, it's so daft," she pipes. "When I first saw the trailer all I could think of was, "Oh God, that's not me!" It's still this feeling of, "How come I'm in this? I'm Kate from Reading, what am I doing in the big…(she checks herself) the most expensive film ever made?" I'll never get over that, I'll never get used to seeing myself on screen."

Accusations of acute luvviedom have been rife (note that it was best friend Em who alerted her to the seriousness of her intestinal condition) and outbursts like "I fucking hat the British press" at Cannes in 1997 have hinted at a streak of petulance. Even so, the attitude of the press has been telling Interminable discussions of her weight "problem" have taken the form of indulgent tut-tutting rather than shock horror revelations of excess, self-loathing and imminent dispatch to the Betty Ford Clinic. After Virgin Radio DJ Russ Williams called the actress "chubby" on air, her mum rang in to complain. Williams performed an abrupt about face. "She's a lovely girl and I apologise for upsetting her mum," he told The Sun the following day. Rather charmingly, her remedy for post-wrap bloating is not decamping to a top health farm in the company of her personal trainer but confining herself to a diet of Brussels sprouts. And Winslet has proved quite capable of dealing with the lardy jibes on her own.

"As a young actress it's easy to think that to be successful you have to be thin," she told the Evening Standard recently. "I used to think like that. I am a slim, normal sort of shape now, but at the same time, I'm a woman and I've go boobs and a bum. I am probably nine-and-a-half stone, but I haven't checked."

("Look," she said later, ramming the point, "I fart, I burp, I don't necessarily shower every day, I don't have colonic irrigation. It is a head-mess to me that people think because you are a successful actor you're different.")

And she earned a heartfelt round of applause on The Clive Anderson Show when she said: "The weight stuff that goes on in the papers just makes me ill because there are so many young girls out there whose minds are being messed up by it. I think it should stop.

Quite.

And the street of shame has fared little better with Winslet's love life. Her three-month fling with Rufus Sewell, her Hamlet co-star, was an uncharacteristically short dalliance and her engagement and subsequent marriage to Jim Threapleton was unfuriatingly conventional. She met Threapleton on the set of Hideous Kinky and as we speak he is performing third assistant director duties on the bustling street outside. There just doesn't seem to be any dirt to be dug on Kate Winslet—the press even gave her a mercifully easy time when her ex-boyfriend and mentor, the scriptwriter Stephen Tredre, died of cancer towards the end of shooting in Morocco. (A few weeks after speaking to Empire, Winslet will miss the Los Angeles premiere of Titanic when she flies to London for Tredre's funeral.)

WITH THE LATRINE SCENE IN THE CAN (as it were), Winselt rehearsing another set-up—washing dishes at a stone sink with Carrie Mullen who plays her youngest daughter Lucy. It's an intimate, quietly touching scene and as cinematographer John De Borman refines the shot, the two actresses improvise dialogue. The seven year old Mullen, wide eyed and impossibly cute, has no previous acting experience, yet her banter with Winslet is relaxed and effortlessly affectionate. They chatter away while the technical tinkerings of filmmaking carries on around them. Winslet is obviously no believer in the adage that you should never act with children or small animals.

"Oh no, they're both great," she gushes when the shot's complete. (Her older daughter is played by Bella Ritza, also seven.) "I mean, they're kids, there are times when they're tired and thy don't want to do things, and there's times when they're arguing with each other. But I can totally understand what it's like for them, I remember what it was like at primary school—-someone nicks your rubber and it's the most annoying thing in the world."

It's also worth noting that Winslet herself first appeared before the cameras aged just 13. Although dancing with the Honey Monster in a Sugar Puffs ad might be construed as somewhat less stressful that the demands placed on her moppet co-starts here.

"We did a scene towards the end of the film when Bilal (Winslet's Moroccan love interest played by La Haine's Said Tagmaoui) buys us plane tickets home. We're sitting in a café and Bea's crying and she says, "If we leave tomorrow does that mean we'll never come back?" And I say, "No, of course it doesn't, of course it doesn't.: Gillies said to her, "Look, I think I'm going to get Kate to help you with the crying." I was thinking, "Shit, I don't even know how I do it myself sometimes. But we talked and she said, "Shall I think about my mum dying or something?" I said, "Well, you can do that, but I think you should be able to do it properly. Do you want to do it properly?" So I talked to her about how we'd never see Marrakech again and how we'd never see any of the wonderful things we'd seen ever again. And she just started crying. And she did not stop crying. There were tears flooding out of her. Even after she'd done this wonderful take, which lasted about 18 minutes, she still couldn't stop crying. I was thinking, "Shit what have I done to this little girl?"

ALTHOUGH SINCE THE RELEASE OF TITANIC Winslet has attributed her "I hate you!" outburst at James Cameron to emotional and physical fatigue, and has similarly toned down the "I nearly drowned" stories, there's no doubt that the film was an incredibly arduous experience.

"There were times when I was very frightened," she says. "But that was more my adrenaline going. You genuinely did fee the cold and sometimes I could be bashing through the water and knocking things out of the way without being aware that I was bruising myself really badly."

In fact, she chipped an elbow. Caught flu an even suffered mild hypothermia.

"I finished Titanic at the end of March 1997 thinking I'm never going to work again!" I was adamant that I was going to take six months off, which I did."

And she makes no bones about her desire to make a small film after the Cameron epic. No doubt Hideous Kinky being set in the desert had some bearing on her decision, but, she claims, it has always been her intention to mix mainstream movies with independents.

Winslet has recently finished shooting Jan Campion's Holy Smoke in Australia (opposite Harvey Keitel) and last year she appeared in the ultra low budget Plunge, without telling her agent, as a favour to a friend. She has also signed on to play the allegedly bisexual author Daphne Du Maurier I a forthcoming biopic.

"I was being sent scripts throughout the summer," "but when Hideous Kinky came in I just wanted to eat it. I'd read the novel when I was 17, a friend had bought it for me as a Christmas present and I completely loved it—the smells and the colours and everything, it was extraordinary. At the time I read it I thought, "God, someone is going to write a screenplay of this one day."

ESTHER FREAUD'S NOVEL ("HIDEOUS" AND "KINKY' are the two girls' favourite words by the way, picked up from the argot of their mother's hippie friends) is loosely based on her own experiences in the late 60s when her mother, escaping a failed love affair in London, took her and her sister to Morocco to find wisdom among the Sufis. Much of the book's considerable charm stems from the fact that events are seen through the eyes of Luc, the youngest girl. Obviously this presented something of a challenge to scriptwriter Billy MacKinnon (Gillies" brother, with whom he worked on Small Faces).

"It's a great book, full of colourful people and incidents, but a screenplay needs to be more focused," says Billy. "Adapting a novel is like taking a car apart in your bedroom and putting it back together again as a motorbike. You can travel the same roads but the engine is different, so there's a new feeling to the journey."

According to Billy MacKinnon the principal difference is his positioning of the love affair between Julia and Bilal at the center of the story. But there is dissent from Winslet.

"To me it's about a family unit," she says. "Bilal isn't really her boyfriend but he does become part of the nucleus, he's part of their way of being. It really reminds me of how my mum and dad were with us. My mum and dad were hippies. Our holidays would be them waking us up at six in the morning and saying, "Come on, we're going to France"—"she stops. "Oh, can you hear that? The cal to prayer."

The distant wail of the mezzin drifts into the courtyard.

"The first one is a five in the morning." Says Winslet. "It's a fantastic wake-up call." Uncannily, it also seems to be Winslet's call to rehearse another scene00a moment of intimacy between Julia and Bilal.

It's early evening now a De Borman is anxious to get the shot. From the balcony he shouts direction to lighting technicians in the courtyard below. At his commands they're shifting lamps and reflectors into new positions and configurations as the sun sinks and the light slowly changes. MacKinnon keeps his eyes fixed on his monitor; this is Borman's show now. It's a real movie moment and the excitement and urgency are palpable. Similarly, there's an air of disappointment when the light fades before De Borman gets the shot and they wrap for the night. While the crew is breaking down equipment in the courtyard, Kate Winslet rushes past on the balcony. She stops.

"I thought I was better, but I'm not," the star explains, before disappearing down the stairs. On her face is a perfectly ordinary, down-to-earth, unaffected by fame look of utter panic. It's an expression you might see on anyone running hell for leather towards a toilet in Morocco.