Love at first sight, hating Hollywood and her darkest moments.

Kate Expectations- At 24, actress Kate Winslet is looking forward to bringing up her first child. Here, Britain’s most bankable star talks about love, impending motherhood and the self-doubts that can make her feel a fraud.

Last month, when she was seven months pregnant, Kate Winslet had the first pedicure of her life. Her husband, Jim Threapleton, whom she married in November 1998, painstakingly applied gold Tommy Hilfiger polish onto Kate’s toes. She displays the results proudly. ‘I had it done for the first time ever because I feel so dumpy and whale-like. And Jim did it because I cant reach my toenails anymore,’ she says.

Pregnancy suits her. Her skin is clear, her eyes are a sparkling greyish-green. Seemingly unaffected and untrammelled by fame, she talks easily about ramifications of the birth of her first child, due the end of September. Instead of dwelling on what the pregnancy means for her career [postponing the filming of Therese Raquin, her next project], she elaborates on the earthier subjects. ‘ I was sick at first, but now I’m fine. At the beginning, I craved fizzy cola bottle sweets and fruit. I couldn’t get enough of them. Then, at about 12 weeks, all the cravings wore off, except for oranges. I couldn’t get enough oranges. At the moment I don’t have much of an appetite. I am retaining a lot of water and expanding. I’ve got swollen ankles and my backside looks like a cauliflower. I’ve completely exploded. I knew I would and I’ve loved every minute of it.’

As Kate has twice been nominated for an Oscar, first for Sense and Sensibility and then for Titanic- the biggest grossing film in history- as well as becoming Britain’s most bankable star, it seems reasonable to suggest that, at the tender age of 24, she has already lived a charmed life. She first bursts out laughing, the crosses her arms defensively. ‘I wouldn’t say it was entirely charmed,’ she says. ‘I am just like every other pregnant mother. I really hope I’ve been a symbol to other pregnant women. I am not a celebrity person who has walked through this pregnancy with a designer bump. I’ve had all the usual anxieties-over what to wear, if I can really do this and whether or not I am too selfish to be a good mother. I sometimes wonder if I am too wrapped up in my own life and wont have space for someone else’s little life. But, of course, that isn’t going to be the case. Jim will be there during the birth. I’d like and certainly hope to have a natural birth, without pain relief. By doing a lot of the right breathing you can handle the pain. But if I’m in agony or if there are any complications, Ill have whatever I’m told to have. I don’t have any fixed plans. It’s all very exciting.’

Kate acting talent was nurtured within an artistic family background. One of four children [her sibling are Anna, now 28, Beth, 21 and Josh, 19], the Winslets had acting in their blood. On her father’s side, there were twin sisters who were part of a Vaudeville troupe. Her maternal grandparents ran the Reading Repertory theatre. Her grandfather also practised as a dentist, conducting surgery in the back garden. Her Father, Roger Winslet, was an actor, and while Kate says she remembers her childhood as secure, there was always an undercurrent of worry regarding his career.

‘There was an atmosphere of ‘where my next job coming from?’ she remembers. ‘My dad would wander round saying ‘oh, my god, I don’t know what is going to happen next.’ When he was out of work, he did everything from being a postman to working for the Tarmac firm, to working for the National Trust.’

Her awareness of the instability inherit in the acting profession didn’t deter her from pursuing her childhood ambition to become an actress. At 11, she went to Redroofs theatre school in Maidenhead, Berkshire, and, at the age of 12, appeared in a Sugar Puffs commercial. Drama school. However, proved to be a disappointment. She was big-boned and voluptuous, and was bullied by malicious children who dubbed her ‘blubber.’

Despite her own success, she is adamant that she would never send her own child to a drama school. ‘It very competitive, very unreal and you have to be very strong. I missed out on a lot of education. Then, when I was 16, I walked straight into a job.’ This was the film Heavenly Creatures. Kate could have gone to university [and had nine GCSE’s to prove it], but couldn’t resist the siren song of acting.

After Heavenly Creatures, she was out of work for two and a half years, and still hasn’t obliterated the anguish. ‘I’ve memories of the awful cattle call auditions when I would think, ‘I’m never going to get this! They’re all prettier than me, thinner than me, I am rubbish, I am going to forget my lines.’ I had to go off and work in a deli. But I would do the same thing again. And if our child wants to be an actor, my advice will be ‘do it because you love it, and for no other reason.’

When she was 15, she fell in love with actor and writer Stephen Tendre. They were together for four-and-a-half years, but broke up around the time she made Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson. Asked who taught her most about acting, she answers, ‘Emma Thompson has probably been the most influential person in my life. Acting has never been the most important thing to her. She’s always put her family first and that’s what I’ve always done.’

She is still indignant about a 1996 article which claimed her sister, Anna, also an actress, was bitterly jealous of her. Nor does she want to sobriquet ‘Hollywood star.’ During the making of Titanic, when there was a strong feeling that the film would be a blockbuster, she railed against the suggestion that success would radically transform her life.

‘ I was so angry when people asked me how I would cope when my life changed. Of course it did and I just had to accept it. But it never changed me. And I could never live in Hollywood, not in a million years. I can’t stand Hollywood because it’s claustrophobic and everybody’s acting and it’s so bloody clean. It’s like Toy Town. There’s no centre to it.’

Her distaste for stardom and Hollywood notwithstanding, after her break-up with Stephen, she did go on another date with an actor, Rufus Sewell. She was still not well versed in the ways of superstardom. One night, she and Rufus were staked out by paparazzi. At the time, she was unaware they were being followed. But, to her horror, pictures of her and Rufus kissing uninhibitedly in a shop doorway appeared in a newspaper the next morning.

‘That happened when I was 20,’ she says blithely, making it sound as if it happened 30 years ago. She goes on, ‘I didn’t know we were being followed and I found it so shocking because it was the first time it happened to me. Then I got used to it. Jim and I don’t make allowances for anything. We don’t avoid doing things because we think it might put us in the public eye. We do exactly what we want to do. We just go about our lives in a normal way.’

She met Jim on the set of Hideous Kinky in Morocco and fell in love with him at first sight. He was third assistant director, and she was the star, but the attraction was instantaneous. When she remembers their first meeting, she gushes like a love struck teenager. ‘He is so much fun. He provides me with constant laughter, with joy. We fell in love at first sight. Completely, disgustingly. It is like one of those stories I used to hear. People would say, ‘I just saw him across the room and I knew he was the man I was going to marry.’ I would say ‘yeah right! That doesn’t happen.’ I was Miss Cynical. But then it happened to me. I saw Jim across the room and I just thought ‘Oh, my god, what am I going to do now?’ I was working and I didn’t want to have a relationship or get involved with anybody. But I just knew he was right. I don’t know whether it was an animal thing, a chemical thing, or god knows what. I think it was a combination of all those things. I just knew he was right for me.’

They should have lived happily ever after. But just a month after Kate first met Jim, Stephen Tendre dies of cancer. ‘Stephen and I had been apart for 18 months,’ says Kate, ‘It was horrendous. Jim was very supportive and amazingly understanding, which was very hard for him, I think. There was me, mourning over someone whom I’d been incredibly close to, whom he didn’t know. He must have been thinking ‘Hang on, was she still in love with him?’ I was grieving. But it wasn’t as if I had just walked out of the relationship. Stephen was my first love, of course he was. But I didn’t feel guilty about having split from him. The relationship didn’t have a future. I knew it wasn’t right.’

After Titanic, she turned her back on Hollywood and made Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, in India. While researching the part, in which she plays a girl who joins a cult, she interviewed a guru there. ‘I was very freaked out,’ she says, ‘I didn’t want someone asking me so many questions. That’s what they do. They want to know about you, get inside you, because they think you’ve got problems. I just wanted to know what gurus were about for Holy Smoke. I was feeling sorted out. I was marrying Jim and I was doing the film. I felt very controlled as a person. Afterwards, I felt uncomfortable. I walked away thinking ‘Hang on a minute, I feel as though I have been pulled apart.’ He was asking me so many in depth questions about myself and I didn’t want to be questioned like that by a stranger. All I learned was, that kind of thing wasn’t for me. I don’t need guidance in my life. I don’t need looking after, I don’t need dissecting spiritually.’

Her self-confidence is breathtaking. But ever the diplomat, and always aware of the impression she is making, she says, ‘I am not always so confident. I have my dark moments. Like everyone else. I have scared moments when I think ‘Who am I? I can’t do this anymore.’ I always think, ‘God, I can’t act. Actually I’m a complete fraud and I am going to be found out sooner or later.’ I am not a walking bubble of confidence all the time. Fame doesn’t give you more confidence. It certainly doesn’t make you think, ‘Ha, I’ve made it, now I can be exactly who I like and fuck everybody else.’ Not at all. I am still the same person.

Her past interviews have been liberally peppered with the f-word, but this is the first time she has used it with me. ‘I’m watching my language,’ she says. ‘Perhaps because there is a child coming and I can’t keep saying fuck in front of a baby. Otherwise, by the age of two, the child will be walking around saying it. Having a child will probably stop me swearing for good. I think having a child profoundly changes you as a person. The baby can hear my voice. I say to it: ‘What are you doing? What are you up to?’ And I play music to it.’

When the baby arrives it is highly unlikely that it will be turned into a media celebrity. When Kate and Jim got married, in 1998, it was to their credit that they rejected the blandishments of Hello! And OK! Magazines, both of whom offered vast sums of money to orchestrate and photograph their wedding. Instead, the couple married in Reading and had their reception at a local pub, the Crooked Billet, feasting on bangers and mash, Bakewell tart and custard.

She didn’t stop working. Last year, Kate made Quills with Geoffrey Rush. The film focuses on the bizarre life and times of the Marquis de Sade and features a scene in which Kate is whipped.

In the past, she has been known to get so involved in her film roles that she has actually fainted on set. So how did she cope with the whipping scene without being traumatised? ‘My character had done something wrong and was being punished, so it wasn’t kinky. But it was hard. Those things are. But I’ve learned to walk away. You have to realise that when you go to work, your whole day isn’t real. You have to make it believable, be as honest as you can, otherwise you can’t convey that sense of reality to an audience. But you can’t take it home with you, otherwise you never have a life.’

So was her transformation from actress who was too involved in her role, to actress able to switch off at the end of the day, achieved by therapy? She looks genuinely appalled by the thought. ‘No, no, I’ve never had therapy. No, no, God, no!’ she says.

Her guard may have been dropped for a moment, but when she talks about working with Mick Jagger- he is executive producer of her new film, Enigma, based on the Robert Harris book-her response is tailored for public consumption. ‘ He’s fantastic, he’s a laugh, a great person. He is kind and not at all like a rock star. He is really down to earth. If it was windy and wet, he would turn up on set wearing Wellingtons.’

She is taking a break from work until next April. For now, at least, all her thoughts are focused on the baby and on Jim. Although she has not planned the birth in every detail, and has deliberately tried not to find out the sex of the baby, Kate is determined that he or she will have an upbringing which will feed the imagination. Earlier this year, she approached the Enid Blyton estate, asking whether she could record Blyton’s the enchanted wood. The estate was delighted and the tape will be released next month.

‘We live in a world where, by the age of 13 or 14, most kids have mobile phones and computer games. I don’t want to be old-fashioned-I’m not, but there’s nothing like good, imaginative, magical stuff, which is what those books are and were for me as a child. I wanted to be involved in bringing them back to life. When I was eight, my teacher asked each of us to write a story. I wrote the Enchanted Wood in my own words. I thought I was going to get away with it, but my teacher said, ‘I think we’ve all heard this story before and we know where it comes from.’ I argued, ‘But I made it up myself! The teacher said, ‘Even the names of the children?’ I said yes, but she didn’t believe me.’

Enid Blyton’s relatives are delighted at Kate’s participation. Not only, says Gillian Baverstock, Blytons eldest daughter, because of the actress’s distinctive speaking voice, but also because Kate is known all over the world. ‘My mother would have been so pleased that she is making her books accessible to even more children.’

For Kate, however, her own childhood seems long behind her. ‘I often say to people I have had about three lives,’ she says, ‘I had a life with Stephen from 15 to 19. I started working as an actress then. Then I had this chunk of mad single life when I had all this tremendous fun and did Sense and Sensibility and Titanic. Now my life is settled and it’s happier than it has ever been, with Jim and having a baby. But I still have the same number of highs and lows. I still have great moments of joy and great moments of fear. But now that I’ve got Jim, I probably have far less fears then I have had in my life. He’s there, he’s the other part of me, so I never feel completely alone.

Transcribed by Madeleine.

Main photos by Lorenzo Agius.