She's Mia's Mamma and Sam Mendes new girl, but she insists she's still the same old Kate, says Sarah Bailey.
Photographs by Mark Abrahams.

Texas. A grisly November day. Kate Winslet is discussing the size of her trailer. 'It's like the bloody Titanic. It's absolutely stupid - it's the size of a small flat.' Being, famously, a sausage-and-mash, no-nonsense kind of gal, she seems almost perturbed to be so well catered for.

The 26 year old is shooting The Life Of David Gale, a death row drama directed by Alan Parker, in which she plays a feisty New York reporter to Kevin Spacey's condemned man. It's the sort of project that has Academy Awards indelibly inked all over it and, whether she likes it or not, Titanic-sized trailers (or, as Kate insists on calling hers, 'my caravan thingy') are part of the territory.

It's early and Kate's hair is still wet from the shower. She's wearing battered boots ('The good old biker boots are back'), trendy Paper Denim jeans and a DKNY fleece. 'So, I'm looking quite the film star - not!' she hoots, and sparks up a cigarette.

The story of her new love affair with director Sam Mendes broke in the newspapers little more than a week ago, and Kate is feeling...she inhales. 'Well, y'know, I'm all right. Under the circs. Jim and I are getting divorced. That's horrible, that's difficult, thats sad. I'm a working mum and that's difficult as well, because I'm trying to make as much time as possible to be with Mia.' She exhales. 'On the whole, I'm fine.'

We've met to discuss Iris, a film on the life of novelist Iris Murdoch (although it seems every morsel of our conversation is flavoured by the dramas going on in Kate's own life). Iris was the first job Kate took after the birth of daughter Mia in October 2000 (you'll remember she lost 60lb of baby weight before taking the role). In the film, Judi Dench portrays Iris as a middle-aged woman stricken by Alzheimer's disease. Kate plays Iris in her roaring days at Oxford - skinny-dipping in the Isis, straddling young men in her rooms and bewitching all who cross her path. 'Having spent however many months breast-feeding and feeling like a cow with udders - which is wonderful, by the way - it was wonderful to be so open and out there,' she says with relish.

I'm curious to know what Kate made of young Iris' sexuality (despite the Henry V fringe and librarians wardrobe, the passionate young Iris Murdoch had quite the harem of lovers, from painfully earnest undergrads to raffish young playboys). 'Well, she was bisexual,' replies Kate. 'She loved men and she loved women. She wasn't promiscuous, manipulative or disloyal...she just loved people. She was a sexual person, but she didn't do anything intimate with anyone unless she genuinely felt something for them.' Kate pauses. She has to be careful what she says, even when discussing a character's approach to love and monogamy, these days, 'because there are so many question marks as to whether Sam and I were together before Jim and I split up, which we were absolutely, catergorically not, incidentally.' She gathers herself. 'Iris wasn't the sort of woman who'd have lots of one-night stands just because she could. People found her deeply interesting and sexy, which is a little hard to believe initially, because she wasn't really a looker, she didn't really wear much make-up and her dress sense was a little questionable. But she was a woman whose soul and whose mind were sexy and attractive to people.'

Kate is as magnetic as the young Iris, and it's not hard to understand why she loved the role. She's made a career out of playing passionate, gutsy, unconventional young women, from Juliet, the consumptive schoolgirl who helps murder her best friends mother in Heavenly Creatures (Kate's 1994 breakthrough) to Madeleine, the Marquis de Sade's maid in Quills. Even in her most romantic period movies, she could truss Kate Winslet up in a corset and mobcap but simply could not sap the life force out of her; which is why her Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, even Rose in Titanic, are so earthed and sexy and vivid for contemporary audiences. They have blood pulsing through their veins, not perfumed water. Likewise, out Kate...

On 22 November 1998, British film's favourite daughter married Jim Threapleton, assistant director, a 'glorious-looking boy' whom she'd met on the set of Hideous Kinky that year. Bangers and Mash were served and a nation rejoiced in Kate's lovely lack of pretension. Elsewhere, the late 90s had turned out to be a shallow, showy period. As celebrity culture became obsessed with conspicuous consumption, VIP partying and body image, Kate came to represent the opposite. She wasn't silly or vain. She didn't spend her life shopping or on starvation diets. She was real, she was irreverent, she showed up to photo calls in wellies. She turned down Shakespeare in Love because there was stuff she'd rather do, and she made vomit faces in interviews if you said the words 'Posh 'n' Becks.'

When Kate and Jim's daughter, Mia, was born in October 2000, the picture of grounded normality was complete. In the one publicity photograph taken of the happy event, Kate wore a Warehouse cardie and looked beautiful and exhausted. And we, the public, rooted all the harder for Kate and Jim to be very happy indeed, because they stood for something comforting, authentic and wholesome in the increasingly synthetic world of famous.

No wonder we all felt let down when the Threapletons announced in September 2001 that their marriage had broken down. What had gone awry in the cosy world of the Threapleton three, we wanted to know? Was Kate still bating on our side against the crass, the glitzy and the la-la? Or had The Movies finally turned her head?

'People have drawn a conclusion that our marriage has broken down because I was so busy and Jim was left holding the baby, and I can't tell you how far from the truth that is,' says Kate. 'In this first year of Mia's life, I worked for precisely 10 weeks. I was on Iris for four weeks and I'm on this film for six. Yes, I know I'm lucky that I can do that, compared to most mothers who have to leave their children from 8.30 in the morning until 6 o'clock at night. I don't need to work as much as other people, and I have the luxury that when I do work, I can take Mia with me, which is fantastic...But Jim was a heck of a lot busier than I was, believe me.'

She could go on, but she won't. Kate and Jim have signed confidentiality clauses about these matters, so anything you think you've read about their divorce has either been taken wildly out of context or simply isn't true. Kate has also made a pledge to herself not to blab about her new boyfriend in public. Suffice to say, when Sam Mendes phones her during the Elle photo shoot, she colours a vivid burgundy.

'I'm right to think you are happy, Kate?' I ask her afterwards. 'You'd be more than right,' she replies softly. 'I've become more protective of my private life...I've learned from experience. But, yeah, I'm very, very happy.' She breathes. 'I should echo what Sam has said, which is that it's early days, but, certainly, I'm very happy. It's a relief to be able to talk about it to the people I really want to tell - friends and family.'

The Kate Winslet/Sam Mendes story began in summer 2001, when they met to discuss Kate appearing in his valedictory season at the Donmar Warehouse, the London theatre of which 36-year-old Mendes has been artistic director for 10 years. He has interested in Kate playing Viola in Twelfth Night and Sonya in Uncle Vanya. Kate declined ('a decision that was made before Sam and I got together...a creative decision') but the seeds of mutual fascination had been sown. 'All I've ever cared about was that people knew this started after she and Jim split up,' Sam Mendes said 'The rest is a straightforward relationship, it's nothing special. There's no story, other than two people: one famous person [he means Kate] and one who's less famous and less interesting [he means himself].'

It's nice of Sam Mendes to be so modest but few people share his assessment. This is the man described by a rival as 'very young, very bright, very talented, very sickening.' And I'm sure we can all now recite his knockout celebrity exes by rote: Jane Horrocks, Rachel Weisz, Calista Flockhart and {do we keep up} Cameron Diaz. He's the man responsible for Nicole 'theatrical viagra' Kidman in The Blue Room. But, much more than this, Sam Mendes is director of the awesome, Oscar-winning American Beauty.

I'd like to know what Kate thinks of her new boyfriend's most famous work, but she thinks the question is unfair and 'cheesy', and she'd rather I kept any reference to it out of this article. 'I'm not even going to comment. For God's sake, I loved it as much as the next person. It was a triumph, but beyond that I'm not prepared to say, because I'll sound like a proud, mushy, gushing girlfriend. [Pause.] I'll be proud and mushy and gushing in private - but no, I can't...'

Kate is more than happy to discuss The Life Of David Gale, about Bitsey Bloom, a sassy Pulitzer prize-chasing New York journalist. commissioned to write the story of the man on death row in the last three days of his life. She aggressively courted Alan Parker to win the part, and soon found herself and Mia departing for Texas shortly after Mia had toddled her first steps. This is the first time she's been on set with her mother (I need hardly mention that On-Set Babies, like Big Trailers, are celebrity trappings Ms Winslet is traditionally highly dubious of). But Mia has thrived.

'People say, "God, you and Mia are like this little double act", and it's true, we're partners. She's my little mate. The chemistry we have is extraordinary. Nothing compares to it.' Unsurprisingly, the child care has been knackering. 'Even when I'm shooting, if I'm up at five, I'm in the kitchen making bottles for that day.' This week, she's getting a break because Jim is in Texas spending a week with their daughter. 'She was thrilled to see him and he was overwhelmed to see her. He caught a few of her first steps before we left England, but she got up one day in Texas and off she went...walking. He was disappointed to have missed that, but we took a lot of photos.'

She seems relaxed that Mia is in Jim's care. 'What we said when we split up, that it's mutual and amicable, is true. It doesn't change the fact that getting divorced is bloody hard and sad. But it's mutual and amicable. If it wasn't, how on earth would I be comfortable with him being in Mia's space and us two seeing each other and talking? We're grown-ups, and our priority is Mia and both having as full a relationship with her as possible, which is absolutely going to be the case.'

For all the bouhaha in Kate's life, it should be made clear that she is very much the earth mother. She takes positive delight in telling me about 'the breast pumps, bottle teats, filthy bibs and dregs of rice cakes' all over her kitchen. She'd hate to be seen as an indulgent parent. She doesn't believe in lavish toys or designer baby clothes ('Burberry bloody pyjamas, she snarls). When the words 'celebrity mother' fall from my lips, apropos of nothing in particular, you can feel the room vibrate.

'People think we couldn't have a problem in the world with having babies, because we have help; we get our bodies back in minutes, we have six personal trainers and a nutritionist. Maybe for some superstars this is the case. I don't know. I'm not them. My God, how hard was it for me to get 60lb off! Just as hard as for the next mother, and I still have crunkly, creepy baby belly which, frankly, I'm proud of because it's my war wound. I say this on behalf of all celebrity mothers: we still get cracked nipples, we still get mastitis, we still frantically do our pelvic floor exercises - all the things any mother does,' she pauses for breath. 'Only I didn't do pelvic floor exercises because I didn't have time. I don't even know where my pelvic floor is.'

Ah. How reassuring to hear that old Kate Winslet roar. 'I still have the same morals. I'm the same person. Having a child, you experience another world, a love you didn't know you had the ability to feel. Part of you thinks, God, I'l never be able to love anything as much as I love this little person. But I would say that, as a person, I haven't changed.' But what about her new relationship? Does she still feel like the same old Kate with her new boyfriend or does she feel like someone, different? 'The one thing that I will say is that I feel more myself,' she smiles. 'That's the one thing I will say.'

Despite the elixir of fresh new love, these are strange, emotional up-and-down times for Kate. While she's adored making David Gale, she's been homesick for England ('the wind, the rain, the getting dark at four o'clock in the afternoon, the greyness'). She's also missed the support network offered by the Winslet tribe (she's one of four children in the expansive, theatrical family). 'There was a time around the break-up when I felt I was living in a commune. If I didn't have the neighbour bringing in food, it was someone else turning up with the shopping. I had my hands so full with Mia that I didn't have time to go out and do the normal things I love to do, It was fantastic in a way. That's another aspect of my character - no matter how bad a situation gets, I think you have to make the best of it.'

So, what are her resolutions for 2002? 'I have the same feelings about New Year that I always have: "Start as you mean to go on". But I'm probably saying it more loudly and clearly to myself than ever before,' she says. She hopes to shoot another film, preferably another in the contemporary American idiom, 'to eradicate the fact that I'm Corset Kate from everybody's mind'.

The phone rings. Kate is required on set, so our interview must end. As she's spent time in New York media scene researching her role as Bitsey Bloom the journalist, I want to know what Kate would ask Kate Winslet if she were interviewing herself. 'I'd ask, "How is it that I still have this ridiculously good skin?",' she laughs (she swears by the Simple skincare range). 'Look, to comment on my complexion does not make me vain. With the little sleep I've been having, the stress of working and everything that's been going on for me, I'm genuinely surprised when I wake up, look in the mirror and..."Ooh. Yes. Face hasn't fallen off yet. Good".'

I think Kate feels a bit sheepish now, but 2001 has been the kind of year to make anyone scared they might age overnight. 'It's not just me, is it? It's been a year of change for many, many people, and my life. And, look, I've come out smiling.' She drops her voice to a whisper...'I've come out with the biggest smile on my face.'

Iris is released on 18 January.

Source: Elle Magazine (UK Edition)
    Text by Vampy. Scans by Steven.