After drenching her ringlets in Titanic, period-pic vixen Kate Winslet is finally ready to hang up her corset

By Stephan Talty Photograph by François Dischinger

If you were shown the face of Kate Winslet and asked to free-associate, what words would come to mind? England. Country lanes. Emotion. Thatched roofs. And probably: Sex, please.

Until Winslet turned up in Sense and Sensibility, the British period film was nearly sexless. But Kate was carnal and modern. Her ringlets were 1811, but her desires were 1995.

"Women didn't have to do that much back then," says Winslet, dressed today in a midnight-blue sweater, hip-hugging slacks and black boots. "They had tranquility, lovely country walks, lots of reading and things. But I think I would have gone mad. I would have liked to have been a man then; I could get all messy and not worry about what I look like, which is when I'm happiest."

At 23, Kate Winslet is clearly not a proper girl. At the 1996 Academy Awards (she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Sense), she behaved, by her own admission, like a teenager—even ogling John Travolta. "I fell in love with him in Grease," Winslet says, her eyes wide. "Fell in love with him! I wanted to be Olivia Newton-John. I was completely blown away."

Winslet's lack of airs is no doubt a result of her "hippified" childhood in Reading, England. Her grandparents owned the Reading Repertory Theatre, and her parents were struggling actors who lived as if the calendar had never moved past, say, 1968. Backyard family plays gave her an avenue of escape, and her problems with weight (an early nickname was "Blubber") gave her a reason to. "I would always playact," says Winslet. "I did feel that I was in this little world of my own. I felt I was a fairy or something, that I could just fly away."

Unhappy in school, she wrote "incredibly dark and blasphemous essays" about Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War ("very, very, very, very strange" she calls them now) and left high school at 16 to pursue acting. Her first gig was dancing with the Honey Monster in a Sugar Pops commercial. Other British TV jobs were followed by the art-house hit Heavenly Creatures (1994), in which she played a rich girl whose feverish fantasy life leads to murder. That performance led to Sense and to worldwide acclaim. In her next film, the grim Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude (1996), Winslet made Sue Bridehead—the ultimate 19th-century "modern" girl— even more modern, by smoking cigarettes and baring all in a nude scene.

Now the $200 million Titanic arrives, with Winslet in the role of Rose, a deeply unhappy young American facing a loveless marriage to a rich man until a sexy, dirt-poor artist (Leonardo DiCaprio) sweeps her off her feet. It would be happily ever after—if it weren't for the small matter of that iceberg.

"Kate has a kind of timelessness about her," says Titanic director James Cameron. "And she's very technical. She does nine takes, then on the tenth she does everything she did on the previous nine—then adds something to it."

Surprisingly, Winslet found herself in tune with the famously perfectionist director. "He's completely manic about he wants, and I'm the same. With that comes tremendous frustration with other people, with yourself, with so many things. You get in terrible states of turmoil. "

What jarred her most about making the transition from British filmmaking to Cameron's mammoth set was dimension and speed. "The hugeness of it!" Winslet cries. "One minute we were having lunch, the next minute we were running through crowds of screaming people or hanging off the sinking ship."

Winslet's emotionalism is almost violent; she cried when she read the outline for Cameron's film. Here is her description of shooting the post-sinking scenes in Titanic: "Standing on the edge of the tanks on the set and looking in at these wailing actresses and this horrible, horrible, dense...emotion and utter hopelessness. It was really horrific to watch and be part of." It's as if Winslet has become the repository for the emotion successfully repressed in British cinema—which is a great deal of emotion.

Her next outing was less trying: She's starring in the adaptation of Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky, a novelized account of Freud's freewheeling childhood in Morocco. "To me it's a tremendous story of joy and living on a shoestring. That became clear to me in Marrakech. The people have nothing." Winslet is clearly looking to bust out of her period dresses. "I really want to work with Danny Boyle and the Trainspotting boys," she admits. "My fear is that they wouldn't even consider me because I've always been seen in these corset-clad pieces."

But as the holidays approach, the actress is thinking traditionally: She will return to her grandparents' house for a "very English Christmas." It involves tramping up the road with pillows and gifts, roasting chestnuts, sitting before roaring log fires, caroling—and it doesn't stop until January 2. Her favorite presents to receive are cookbooks and kitchen stuff ("because I'm a bit of a Suzy Homemaker"). To give? "Some kind of clothing, not particularly chic, a cozy jumper or walking socks."

Unlike so many Hollywood stars, who seem uprooted, as if floating in a celebrity firmament like beautiful aliens, Winslet is clearly rooted in her homeland—though on her own terms. Asked to describe something about her that would shock her fans, she pauses for a full minute.

"Oh, once we were on holiday, and it was getting dark, and my little sister and I wanted to go for a swim," she recalls. "We walked to the beach, and there was nobody there. And I said, 'Should we skinny-dip?' And we did, and it was absolutely freeeezing cold, like you wouldn't believe. And people started arriving, and my family came down, and I said, 'Should we just stand up and walk out?' And we did. And my family was screaming, 'You're mad, you're mad!' "

Kate Winslet, naked and laughing, striding from the sea. Talk about a new England.

Titanic opens Friday.

Source: Time Out New York