I'VE QUIT SMOKING AND BECOME CALMER, MORE VULNERABLE AND SQUISHY

STAR KATE ON PARENTHOOD
THE star of the world's biggest-grossing movie is proud to present her favourite spectacular, a baby. Kate Winslet drools over three-week-old Mia Honey Threapleton and gushes: "She's my most amazing production yet, absolutely gorgeous. And she's transformed my life.''

The 25-year-old Titanic actress, wife of film director Jim Threapleton, explained how her personality has changed because of her daughter. "I'm a lot less hectic than I was," she said in her first interview since Mia's October 12 birth. "I've stopped smoking and I've become a much calmer, softer person. I'm becoming much more squishy and vulnerable and emotional and I'm sure I'll find it a lot easier to cry on screen."

She added: "I wanted to be a young mum because I wanted to be able to enjoy my child when I'm young and active. My mum and dad are ecstatic and Jim's parents are as well."

Kate admitted that she and Jim, 26, are busy learning about parenthood. "We've been in this little baby cocoon since the day Mia was born," she said. "She is so precious that for the first few days we were worried about breaking her and every nappy change would take 30 minutes. Now it takes 30 seconds. We're getting quicker at these things and realising babies are very robust and not as fragile as we thought. Jim is brilliant with her and there are times when I look at him with her and wish I could be as good as he is."

The couple met while working on the film Hideous Kinky and married two years ago. Kate breast-fed Mia, then left her in Jim's care while speaking to The Mirror.

She told me: "Before I came to talk to you I thought 'My God, how can I concentrate on what I am saying?' My mind has been so much on her that it's very bizarre to find myself re-engaging with the real world again."

There are no celebrity-style airs and graces about Kate. She is refreshingly down-to-earth and appears so approachable that strangers do not hesitate to come up and talk to her when she is out shopping.

"I'm a normal person,'' she said, "so I end up having lovely chats with people at the fruit and vegetable stall and I love it. I'm flattered that people want to talk to me."

But is not afraid to be controversial - and expresses her "outrage'' over stars who have sold photographs of their newborn babies to magazines.

She declared: "I have very strong feelings about that. There is a very fine line between satisfying the public's interest and selling your private life. I find it kind of sad that people feel the need to do that and at the end of the day you can only say that they needed the money. I would never do that. No matter how poor I was my private life would always be the most important thing in the world. And if I didn't have that I would just be a commodity. I would never sell things to magazines like OK and Hello." Kate and Jim paid pounds 800,000 for their house overlooking the River Thames outside London, so that their daughter could grow up away from the bustle of the metropolis.

And, putting Mia first, Kate plans to choose film projects that will keep her near to home for some time to come.

The star said: "It's very important to us that Mia isn't put into a bag and bundled off to film locations. "I don't want to see her anywhere but at home for the next five years. I'm not working for about six months now and when I do work it will be near home. Therese Raquin, which I'm filming next year, is being shot at Shepperton Studios, half an hour from where I live. After that, I don't know what I'm going to do."

But it will be a long time before Mia is allowed to see her mum's latest film Quills, which had its British premiere in London on Friday. In the movie Kate plays a laundry maid at the lunatic asylum where perverted author the Marquis de Sade is held.

Quills depicts torture and brutality. And Kate has an explicit lovemaking scene with Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the marquis. She recalled: "That scene was the hardest for me to do, not just because it's a nude scene - and they're always hard for me to do - but because there was so much emotion in it."

To prepare herself for the role she read some of the marquis's writings - but wishes she hadn't. "They're embarrassingly vile," she said.

Even at the premiere, however, Kate's mind was still on Mia and the child's future. "If Mia wants to be an actress when she grows up, that's fine by me," she said. "I want her to do what she wants. I just hope I can bring her up to be a happy, stable child who doesn't want to run away from home at the age of 13."