New York Daily News - April 18, 1999
Winslet's Own Story Unlike title of her new movie, her life since 'Titanic' is neither 'Hideous' nor 'Kinky'
By MATTHEW McCANN FENTONWhen you bump into Kate Winslet in the lobby of a New York hotel, the first thing you notice about her are all the things you don't notice: No entourage, no bodyguards and a lot less of the young lady herself than you've been led to expect.
"When they meet me, people are always expecting to see this sort of large person," she says with a laugh, "and I'm not. I'm completely normal."
And so she is, in more ways than one.
Winslet is in town to talk about her new movie, "Hideous Kinky" (don't get your hopes up — although there is a brief nude scene, the movie is surprisingly wholesome). But she can't resist holding forth on everything from her figure to fame to falling in love and getting married. And not necessarily in that order.
Ask Winslet what it's like to walk around with a face that has been seen by more people than just about any other on the planet, and she answers:
"I became very well known in a film that is going to go down in history. That was a real gift."
She pauses a second before adding impetuously — "and screw awards!"
And the changes it has brought to her life?
"The bad change is the occasional — and I mean very occasional — invasion of privacy. But I don't think that anyone becomes public property without their consent.
"If you're going to play the film-star part — you know, running for your life and trying to evade paparazzi — that just leads to unhappiness, if you ask me."
The other thing that has taken some getting used to is the fascination she holds for crowds.
"Sometimes it would get me down where, 'Look, I only want to go to the corner shop and get a bottle of water and I'm being hounded all the way.' "
Two Different Worlds
Whenever the hounding gets to be too much, Winslet recalls the reaction of fans a world away. When she was in India, working on her next film, "Holy Smoke" (which will be released in the fall), "I saw people who live in the mountains and who have no money, journeying for five hours to come to the nearest city, then queue for 10 hours to see 'Titanic.' "
When she learned that most of them were illiterate, and couldn't read the Hindi subtitles, "I just wanted to weep."
"The good change is that I understand myself much better," Winslet says.
Sensing that she may be sounding a tad metaphysical, Winslet winces and asks, "That sounds a bit wanky, doesn't it?"
"But it's true," she continues. "I know much more who I am now. I've always had a very kind of willful streak in my personality. And I realized after 'Titanic' that I never want to do that Hollywood kind of back-to-back movie thing — I'd burn out. I think I would end up an alcoholic and falling asleep under the table if I just did endless 'Titanic'-type movies."
And "Hideous Kinky," which opened here on Friday, is about as far as you can get from a "Titanic"-type movie. It's based on the novel by English author Esther Freud, recalling the years she spent as a young girl with her hippie mother in Morocco.
"I read it when I was 17," Winslet recalls. "It was a Christmas gift from a friend."
Love and Death
This sounds slightly mysterious, and after a bit of prodding, Winslet opens up. The book was given to her by her then-lover, Stephen Tredre, who died of cancer in December 1997.
"Even after we had broken up, Stephen and I remained very close," she recalls. "Then this script landed in front of me, and I knew the title sounded very familiar."
Winslet felt that "there was something pulling me to do 'Hideous Kinky,' " but she was unsure whether a small, independent film was the right project to follow "Titanic."
"I phoned Stephen and asked him, 'what do you think I should do?' He said, 'You trust your gut, girl; you do that film.' And I did."
Tredre died while "Hideous Kinky" was shooting and just as "Titanic" premiered in Los Angeles. Without hesitating (and under quite a bit of pressure to do the contrary), Winslet skipped the premiere to attend Tredre's funeral.
"Everyone was saying to me, 'Don't you think Stephen would have wanted you to have your day and be a princess?' And I said, 'Bull——!'
"Apart from the fact that being a princess is just not me anyway, no — he would have wanted me to be at his funeral and say goodbye. How could I have gone to L.A. and attended a party, knowing what was going on that day?"
Winslet's voice softens as she recalls the days after saying goodbye to Tredre.
"I still had to get through the last three weeks of the shoot on 'Hideous Kinky.' The way I got to the end was I thought, 'This is my gift to Stephen. I'm doing this for him.' "
Tredre's last gift to Winslet came on the set of 'Hideous Kinky.' Working under the Moroccan sun one afternoon, her eyes met those of third assistant director Jim Threapleton.
"I'll never forget it. I just saw him, and actually my feeling was, 'Oh, s—t!' It was like, 'Oh, my God; here we go. This is major.'
"I just knew at that second — immediately — that it was going to happen. And a week later it was happening and then we came home together. And three months later he asked me to marry him, and I just went, 'Yesssss!'
"If Stephen hadn't given me that book and then recommended that I do the film …"
Winslet's voice trails off as she imagines never having met her husband.
"It just grounds me so much more," is how Winslet describes being married. "The first time I ever came to New York, I was on my own and, actually, times were pretty lonely. I was thinking, God, I'm in this big city and I've got no one to share it with."
Now she does.
"The other day, I was just looking [at Threapleton as they stood together on a Manhattan corner], thinking, 'Now I'm here with somebody, and you're my husband.'
"How great is that? Knowing that you get to spend every day for the rest of your life with your best friend."
Winslet also has a refreshing instinct for cutting to the chase. When an interviewer begins tiptoeing toward the issue of what she calls "physicality," Winslet interrupts: "Okay, so you're talking about size, right?"
Right.
So Winslet launches full throttle into her take on what for some actresses might be a touchy subject.
The Big Picture
"When I was making 'Titanic,' I was just surrounded by people who were telling me, 'Oh, you're so beautiful and so voluptuous and this is going to be the new thing.' As if being me were somehow clever or calculated.
"And it became something that was just taking away from myself. So I eventually asked people I worked with, 'Please don't comment on that, because its just who I am.' "
Which might make you think that she doesn't want to talk anymore about what has made her a hero to the legions of women who suffer under the tyranny of svelteness. But you'd be wrong.
"I don't want to sound preachy or anything," she continues, "but there are young girls out there whose minds are very naive and very, very vulnerable who have been completely screwed up by this whole thing.
"So when 'Titanic' came out, I thought, 'Right, I'm going to go for this — I've done it, I've gotten there and I'm not a rake and I'm never going to be a rake. I'm going to say that this doesn't matter.
"I've been in the starvation camp," Winslet recalls of her years as a teenage actress, "and I was very unhappy. I made myself ill — to the point where I was fainting. Now, I'm very happy being me."
As Winslet's lone assistant signals that they're running late for an appointment, she waves away all this self-examination by saying, "I mean, if I'm going to be myself, I had better start doing it now."
But then it seems to occur to Winslet that maybe it's possible to be a bit too much herself. So as she dashes off to God-knows-where, she calls out one last request:
"Do me a favor? Take out all the swear words? My mum always reads these pieces and says, 'Darling, you always swear so much,' and I say, 'No I don't. They're just making it up.' "
Consider it done.