Kate Winslet is just a down-to-earth middle-class girl form Reading, even if the host of big names willing to work with her and two Oscar nominations suggest otherwise

BY ED POTTON

No other British actress has been borne on the prow of a multibillion-dollar movie. No other British actress has such clout in Hollywood’s casting bearpit. No other actress of any nationality has been nominated for two Oscars before turning 23. But nobody seems as determined to prove their unaffected normality as Kate Winslet.

When people suggested that she put down roots in L.A, she answered incredulously, “Why? What for?” While her American peers provide interviewers with the blandest and most guarded of answers, Winslet puts her (size ten) foot in it with charming regularity. Take her comments on portraying a lust-inspiring laundry maid in her new film, Quills, a fictional account of the life of the Marquis de Sade: “I wondered if people would accept me playing a lower-class scrubber. It’s normally the sort of role Martine McCutcheon would play.”

Tactless, perhaps, but probably correct. The undeniably middle-class Winslet, one of a six-strong family of actors from Reading, will be forever defined by her Oscar-nominated role as a feisty debutante in Titanic (1997). But her determination to resist the pull of Hollywood showed when, instead of following James Cameron’s behemoth with the female lead in Shakespeare in Love, which she was offered, she opted for a small independent picture, Hideous Kinky (1998).

It was while shooting that film in Marrakesh that she met her husband Jim Threapleton who, as a lowly third assistant director rather than a world-famous leading man, fitted in perfectly with her down-to-earth image. Not that this was the initial source of the attraction: “I saw Jim and thought, ‘I’m not going to get through this with my legs crossed’.”

Then, of course, there is the rabidly discussed topic of her weight. At the age of 16, Winslet tipped the scales at 13st and was known to her bitchy classmates at Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead as “Blubber”. Though she slimmed down for her first screen role in Heavenly Creatures (1994), her fluctuating curves have made headlines ever since.

As Leonardo DiCaprio, her co-star in Titanic, told her: “Honey, you’re always going to have that ‘I’m a fat girl’ thing. Forget it, you’re gorgeous.” But now, three months after the birth of her first child, Mia, she is resigned once again to some committed dieting. Then she can continue a career that has seen her work with some of cinema’s most unconventional directors.

Heavenly Creatures, a film by the offbeat New Zealander Peter Jackson, saw her play an obsessive, and ultimately homicidal, schoolgirl. The visionary Ang Lee cast her as the romantic Marianne opposite her mentor Emma Thompson’s pragmatic Elinor in his zesty adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), a performance which won her her first Oscar nomination. The “wonderfully mad” Jane Campion asked her to pee in the desert in Holy Smoke (1999), and she is shortly to appear in Enigma, Michael Apted’s codebreaking drama.

For the moment, though, Winslet is content to play happy families with Mia and Threapleton, now a writer and director, with whom she has set up a production company, Telltale Films. But don’t expect any husband-wife collaborations in the near future: “I want him to direct me more than he wants to direct me.” Which, for one of the most prized (and, despite her protests, least ordinary) actresses around, has got to be a first.

CV: Kate Winslet

Full name Kate Elizabeth Winslet

Born October 5, 1975, in Reading, Berkshire

Family Her father Roger, mother Sally, and sisters Anna and Beth are all actors. Also has a brother Joss

Marital status Married Jim Threapleton in November 1998, with whom she has a daughter, Mia

Big break Being cast in Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Finest hour Being nominated for an Oscar for Sense and Sensibility at the age of 20