by Degen Pener, photographed by Andrew Macpherson

Once you've starred in the biggest screen romance of all time, what do you do for an encore? If you're Kate Winslet, you shed those lush curls, make small films you adore - and enjoy a great love story all your own.

Kate Winslet is in danger of running out of superlatives: "the most incredible," "so wonderful," "the most gorgeous," "so exciting," "perfection." Since she's the co-star of the most gargantuan movie of all time, perhaps it's fitting she uses language of such Titanic proportions. But what could be the object of all this raving? Check out the two white-gold bands joined by diamonds, on her ring finger. "It's brilliant being married, so brilliant," says Winslet, still flush with bliss since tying the knot with English film director Jim Threapleton, 25, last November. To her, this real-life romance is a thousand times - no, make that a million times - more compelling than the world-renowned love affair between Rose and Jack on that ill-fated ship. "I sometimes look at Jim and think, God, I'm so lucky that I'm allowed to love somebody this much," says Winslet, 24, her clear blue-green eyes turning dreamy.

Not only does Winslet appear to be consumed and transformed by love, but she is also sporting a strikingly fresh look. Gone are the long auburn locks she wore as Titanic's disarmingly elegant Rose: Her hair is now cropped just below her ears and is back to its natural light brown with blond highlights. "It was quite damaged from all those water scenes and from re-dyeing it red so many times," says Winslet. "I just thought, Right, that's it, I'm cutting it off. [My hairstylist and I] cracked open a bottle of champagne, and she took the first chop, and I went 'Aagh!' and off it came!"

A tomboyish haircut and a schoolgirlish crush on her new husband are not the answers you might expect to the question that Winslet says everyone asks her: How has she changed since that watershed movie? "After I did the boat film - and now I'm only allowed to call it the boat film in my house - so many people said to me, 'Oh my God, your life is going to really change,'" she says, speaking in rapid-fire bursts. "But I made a decision that there weren't going to be any changes. I still go down to my local swimming pool, and stand on the queue, and pay like everybody else."

OK, so she is holding this conversation in a members-only club - Blacks, in London's trendy Soho. It's often her base when she comes into town from her home in the northern part of the city, but it's a notably unglamorous hangout, no cell phones allowed, with no seeing or being seen to be done. Wearing Levi's, a white T-shirt and Birkenstocks, Winslet stretches out on a pile of throw pillows and casually rolls a cigarette. "I think the only thing about me that's possibly changed is that I've become calmer and not so frantic," says the actress. Unlike Leonardo DiCapio, her notoriously partying co-star, Winslet rode out Titanic's 1997-98 media storm and then virtually disappeared from the public eye. Like DiCaprio, she has returned to much artier films, including this month's Holy Smoke, in which she plays Ruth, an Australian girl engaged in a twisted, erotic power struggle with a cult deprogrammer. "It was my most challenging role ever," says Winslet, "more exhausting than spending six days a week in the water. I just loved it." Says Smoke director Jane Campion (The Piano): "I needed someone Kate's age who could energetically match [co-star] Harvey Keitel. Kate is a torrent. She's a powerful force of nature."

Indeed, according to Kenneth Branagh, who, in 1996, directed Winslet in Hamlet, his friend "can still be a whirlwind. But she's a little more economic with her energy now. She's got a partner who provides her with an absolutely special reality." Perhaps no-one is as surprised as Winslet herself at the tranquil waters she finds herself sailing at Threapleton's side. "I spent two years where I was absolutely looking for Mr. Right," she says. As a waiter enters from a nearby door, she adds, "Two years ago, that door would have opened and I'd be going, God, maybe that's him, maybe that's the one. It was just ridiculous. Then I went, You know, I'm just going to enjoy being single and do what I like. As soon as I wasn't looking for it, that's when it hit me."

Winslet was hit - no, walloped - by Cupid in November 1997 while making her previous film, last spring's indie drama Hideous Kinky. One day during filming, she was informed that an attractive new assistant director had been hired, which initially seemed hardly out of the ordinary. But as she drove to the set, she recalls, "I had butterflies. I'm going to meet this man I've never met in my life, and I had this feeling in my stomach almost like a volcano starting to erupt."

"When I met Jim, not only did I just go, Oh my God, he's completely the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen, but I knew within the first hour, This is it, the rest of my life sitting next to me here right now," she says. Within six months, Threapleton asked her to marry him. But soon after, she left for a remote part of Australia to shoot Holy Smoke. "I'm leaving to go to a desert for four months, and it was like hell. We were both in bloody tears. So many people said, 'It will be fine, time will go quickly,' but I cannot tell you what a lot of crap that is."

On the set of Smoke, Winslet began racking up a huge phone bill. "They rigged up a mobile telephone station, but if you drove an hour down the road you lost the signal, and our location was an hour and a half away," she recalls. "So I'm going off to work 13 hours a day and can't speak to Jim and it was just awful. I'd get back and he would have left me about 20 messages. singing various songs and saying silly things." Sometimes the two would send valentines by fax. "I'd trace a print of my hand and send it to him - you could see the ridge of my engagement ring - and he's send me back one with his hand on top of it. It was brilliant, really brilliant."

When she returned from Australia, the pair were married in a traditional, Protestant church in the countryside outside London. Emma Thompson and her boyfriend, actor Greg Wise, were the only celebrities among the 170 friends and family members looking on at a ceremony that Winslet (who wore a white dress by Alexander McQueen for Givenchy, with an Indian-style pendant in her hair) calls "completely normal, totally normal." Or at least as normal as the press allowed. "We sent out our invitations with the wrong date in case any went astray," says Winslet. "As soon as people replied, we told them the real date. And the day before the wedding, me and my sister and Jim all sat in my sister's house phoning everbody up saying, 'Right, your pickup point is...'" Even with all that, photographers showed up. "We just went ahead and stopped and smiled for them," she says. "As long as you give them what they want, they love you."

After a two-and-a-half-week honeymoon in Scotland, Winslet didn't make a movie for eight months. "The first year of marriage you never get again, and it's so important to lay those foundations," says Winslet, who spent part of the winter with Threapleton at a friend's home in Cornwall, on the English coast. He surfed; she boogie-boarded. She also took long walks, in her favorite Harley-Davidson biker boots: "I find it very difficult to wear nice, pretty shoes. I'm much more comfortable in boots or Birkenstocks or loafers." Her beauty routine is as minimal as her utilitarian wardrobe. She moisturizes her famously translucent skin with Kiehl's Ultra Facial moisturizer and uses Aveda Flax Seed Aloe gel and Aveda Brilliant pomade on her hair. "You just can't get out of bed in the morning with short hair - it's going out at right angles all over the place."

Since returning to London, she and Threapleton have been redecorating her duplex apartment there. "Jim's a brilliant artist. He's painting these Edward Hopper-type things all over the place." They also garden and cook together. "I'm actually quite a good cook," she says. Her specialty, chorizo broth, "I can make standing on my head. For Christmas and birthdays I say, 'Don't anyone get me anything particularly flashy, just more and more cookbooks, more kitchen stuff like big plates.'" Despite her love of food, a few years ago Winslet was practically starving herself to stay thin. Her post-Titanic decision to embrace her natural curves resulted in a media eruption she found "a complete bore because I am so not fat. I'm fit. I'm healthy. I feel so much more comfortable this way. For God's sake, don't argue with nature!"

After lunch, Winslet strides out of Blacks and into Piccadilly Circus, one of the busiest, most touristy sections of London. As she walks, she mentions that her younger sister, Beth, also an actress, recently dyed her hair red. "She looks the same way I did in Titanic," says Winslet. Now people mistake Beth for Kate. Meanwhile, the real Kate strolls down the street, sans sunglasses or hat, without drawing so much as a stare. She even chats with a stranger about the weather while waiting for a light to change. Still no hubbub. And perhaps it's fitting - for someone with enough perspective on life to think of herself as the star of a boat film.

Here are the bits of texts with the various pics:

Winslet, in a Bazar de Christian Lacroix sweater, has "an inner calm," says Kenneth Branagh, "which is miraculous, given the last three years."

"I'm not one of those women who play with their hair for an hour," says Winslet, in Christian Dior, left, and Suss Design sweater, opposite. "I'd rather get on with it."

"When I was 18 and 19 and 20, I would weigh myself and write it down in my diary. I'm not that person now. I have that feeling of not caring. I'm just happy being me."

"We have not had one night apart since we got married, which is so wonderful. I wake up in the morning and roll over and just look at him. It's the most overwhelming thing."

"I think people are more likely to notice you if you're a movie star trying to hide in a baseball cap and sunglasses," says Winslet, in a Lucien Pellat-Finet cashmere wrap dress, Agent Provocateur slip and Sergio Rossi sandals. "I love that people feel they can approach me."

And here's the side bit titled "Kate's favorite things":

Her Canon Elph 370Z was a gift from Titanic director James Cameron. "It fits in your pocket and takes the most stunning photographs."

Winslet likes this pearl-and-silver necklace, a 20th-birthday present, for its versatility: "You can wear it with a nice suit, or jeans and a vest."

The soulful compilation CD series 'Cafe del Mar - Ibiza, Vol. 3' "is very inspiring and emotional. It goes with me." She got her Rip Curl wet suit and Manta boogie board so that when her husband surfs, "I'm not left out. I just jump in and make silly noises like 'wheee!'"