Exclusive: Titanic girl Kate Winslet talks about her life, loves and two-hour 'guru' in an exclusive interview to Jon Stock during her trip to India

Kate Winslet is in a bit of a muddle. "It's here somewhere," she says, pulling out a sheaf of shirts from an overstuffed suitcase on the floor. Eventually she finds a delicately embroidered white salwar top and matching baggy trousers, a "chicken dress" as she calls it, and lays it out on the bed.

Her older sister, Anna, is getting married in four days' time and Kate, who is one of the bridesmaids, has decided to wear Indian clothes. "Gorgeous aren't they? So cool and feminine. I was trying to get my little sister Beth into something similar as well, but she's so blimmin stubborn. She's very into surfing trousers and tight t-shirts at the moment."

Kate is at the end of a two-week stint in India, where she has been shooting the final leg of Holy Smoke, an Australian film directed by Jane Campion. Her work is complete and she is demob happy, full of disarmingly candid chat about boyfriends past and present, the night she visited an ashram and cried more than she has ever done in her life and, of course, THAT film.

I'm not entirely unhappy, either. Kate, who has just turned 23, has one of those faces that could go either way. Of the men that I know, half think that she is nothing special to look at. The rest of us respond to the bold sweep of her jaw line, the charcoal eyebrows and, most of all, the full-lipped painted smile, dropping at the corners, that momentarily transforms her matey, pub-chat manner into something otherworldly.

Thoughtfully, she has agreed to meet in a small room, almost entirely filled by a double bed, at a five-star hotel near the airport in New Delhi. The whole evening lies ahead of us before she will have to drag herself away for a midnight flight back to London. She sits at a small table, her bare legs slung breezily across one corner, and rolls a cigarette as we talk.

She looks in good shape, no makeup, fair hair tied back, and she is wearing baggy blue shorts and a black tight fitting blouse. More disconcertingly, she finishes the occasional sentence with a genuinely absent-minded ping of her bra-straps. "We are so desperate to get back to England," she says. "We've been fantasising about coffee and croissants in Soho, bangers and mash and pints.".....ping.

Kate looks across affectionately at the bed, where her 24-year-old fiancˇ, Jim Threapleton (did I not mention him?) is watching television with the sound turned down. They had been going out for 11 months before announcing their engagement in September and during the course of our evening together, I am afraid that he came across as a levelheaded, thoroughly decent bloke.

As we talk, the hotel phone never stops ringing and there is a steady stream of unsummoned bellboys offering water, soap, bed sweets, anything for a close encounter with the "ravishing Rose of Titanic", as one member of the hotel staff describes her. It has been the same wherever she has gone, first in Delhi, where crowds stood in torrential rain to watch her walk across a bridge, and then out at Pushkar in Rajasthan, where she was mobbed in the marketplace. "It's been more extreme than anything we have ever experienced before," she says.

I tell her that in western Uttar Pradesh illiterate agricultural labourers are packing their local cinema halls to see Titanic time and again, though unable to read the Hindi subtitles. In Assam, a theatre company is touring with a stage production of the film, complete with three large wooden models of the fated ship. The show is fully booked for the next eight months. She seems genuinely moved. "It almost wants to make me cry," she says.

Unfortunately, I must be one of only a handful of people in the world, certainly the only person in India, who has NOT seen the film. I have tried, but the film has been sold out at our local cinema in south Delhi for weeks and I don't have a video. The question is, should I tell her? "Actually, I like meeting people who haven't seen it," she says kindly.

I've watched 20 minutes, I add, the bit where Jack pulls her back from the stern railings. (The manager of our local cinema complex let me sit in the aisle after I told him I was meeting the ravishing Rose that very evening.) Did I miss anything? "She falls for him, he falls for her, he dies, and that's that."

I offer to order up some more drinks, they are both drinking Blue Riband gin, and Kate passes round a bowl of shelled pistachios. We're here to talk about her forthcoming releases, Holy Smoke and Hideous Kinky, but we can't possibly move on without discussing Leonardo di Caprio, who played Jack opposite her Rose. After their famously close relationship on set, do they still keep in touch?

"Sporadically. I got a message over the summer that he had been frantically trying to contact me. I thought, I hope he was okay. I rang him up and he just wanted to talk to me about a job. We always talked about what we were doing next, in terms of life or work. It was that kind of friendship. We were great mates and that was something I will always remember."

Kate has a remarkably down to earth manner for someone in her position. Blasˇ references to "Leo" and "Jim" (James Cameron) are the closest her conversation veers towards luvvy-speak, otherwise she talks freely and without pretension.

She grew up in the bosom of a sprawling theatrical family in Reading, where her grandparents ran a small theatre at the bottom of their garden. Her uncle, Robert Bridges, was the original Mr Bumble in the West End version of Oliver. Kate's father, Roger, is a professional actor, although he has never enjoyed the success of his daughters, all of whom are actresses. "Dad finds it hard to get work but he is proud of all of us," Kate says. "He's proud of my brother, too. Joss is 17, very intelligent, a little shy, and doesn't quite know what he wants to do. Anna is happy doing what she is doing."

Anna's future husband is also an actor and they divide their time between television work and rep theatres. As for Beth, who is 19, she came to prominence in May this year in a TV adaptation of Minette Walters's The Scold's Bridle. More recently, she completed a low budget British film called Body Work and a play with Charles Dance in Birmingham. "Beth had always quietly wanted to act, then suddenly last year, she was doing it too," Kate says, making the transition of Winslets into starlets sound like an easy, almost accidental process.

It hasn't been, of course. Until Kate shot to prominence three years ago, when she was nominated for an Oscar in Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility, there was little money in the family. They grew up in a modest house and holidays consisted of camping or staying at friends' houses. Kate attended Redroofs, a stage school, and left at 16 with eight O levels and a sugar puffs advert to her name. At 17, she made her film debut in the acclaimed Heavenly Creatures, playing a teenage murderer with an obsessional crush for another girl. She went on to play the impulsive Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and confirmed her talent for playing bonneted belles by starring as Sue Bridehead in Michael Winterbottom's Jude, and as Ophelia in Kenneth Brannagh's version of Hamlet. All before her 21st birthday.

Titanic's success has made her wealthy, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount, which made the film, gave her a goodwill bonus, rumoured to be $1 million, and she enjoys being able to treat her family. She recently sent a trunk full of shawls from Jaipur to Reading, "they cost £20 each but would sell for £800 in Liberty's," she says.

Titanic has also brought unwelcome attention from the tabloid press, who pester her family with phonecalls, often about her weight. "But nothing in terms of my life and friends and people around me has ever changed and I am immensely grateful for that."

One of those friends is Emma Thompson, who has become a mentor to her since they appeared together in Sense and Sensibility. Kate moved in with her for a while after she split up with her boyfriend of five years, Stephen Tredre. "Emma is incredibly down to earth. Yes, she is very English and clever, but she is bloody hilariously funny and not plummy-up-your-backside-theatre-luvvy at all."

While living together, Kate accepted the part of Ophelia, playing opposite Brannagh's Hamlet. Was Emma supportive then, given that she had recently separated from Brannagh? "It was totally fine. I remember when I told her I was doing Hamlet, she said, Ōoh good for you, good for you, Ken's a great director, you'll love him, he is a fabulous team leader and really funny'. It wasn't a problem at all."

It is the influence of Stephen Tredre, however, that seems to have shaped Kate's career more than anyone else. Tragically, he died in December 1997, after a long battle with cancer. They split up in 1995 but stayed close, talking almost every day. He urged her to take the lead in a £2.5 million British adaptation of Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud's novel. Her agents were steering her down the big budget route and had "loads of money" on the table for a copper-bottomed Hollywood blockbuster.

Kate knew and loved Freud's book. She also had an overwhelming sense that she must take the smaller film. After further consultations with Stephen and Emma Thompson, she signed up for a modest fee and flew out to Morocco to join the film's director, Gillies McKinnon, and his brother Billy, who wrote the screenplay.

"I was just so relieved to find that someone had the guts and courage to write a film script of this wonderful book. Nobody could understand why I wanted to do it, but I knew strongly that there was a reason. I also knew that when I went off to Morocco, Stephen was going to be at home getting sicker and sicker." For the first time, Kate's voice falters. She tries to strike a match and then asks Jim for a lighter, which she drops.

When news came through in Morocco that Stephen had died, Kate flew back to London for the funeral, resisting pressure from the makers of Titanic to be at the Los Angeles premiere. She had also missed the London opening, brought low by a devastating bout of amoebic dysentery.

After the funeral, Kate had to find it in herself to complete the shoot of Hideous Kinky. It was hard, but she knew what Stephen would have wanted. It had been him who had originally introduced her to the book, giving it for Christmas when she was 17.

Looking back, Kate now believes that she chose Hideous Kinky was because she met Jim on set. A graduate in History of Art, Jim was called out to the shoot as a third assistant director, but watch closely and you might spot him sharing a scene with Kate.

Kate was in Rishikesh in May this year on a low key trip to research Holy Smoke, in which she plays an Australian backpacker who gets heavily involved with a baba at an Indian ashram. Contrary to reports that appeared in the Indian media, Kate was not on a personal visit. It was purely work. Jane Campion, the director, wanted her to understand the hold such places can have over westerners.

Kate felt unnerved from the moment she arrived in the town. She checked in at an ashram that was popular with shaven-headed westerners. "I sat down with this guru, who was constantly smiling, and I just felt really judged. I gave the guru a fake name and he said what do you do and I said I was an actress, and he said oh that's interesting. I said I did theatre in London and he said you are working all the time, are you, and I said yes, I am very busy, I have this hectic lifestyle and I felt terrible. I just thought, I am lying and he knows it, I am going to go to hell for this."

"He then showed me these rooms which I found really depressing: They had PG Tips tea bags and little jars of Marmite and hand-washed knickers hanging up, and photos from home. I thought, what are you all doing? What are you all doing? Then the guru took me to the Ganges and I said, wow, look at all these lovely fires, what are they burning and they were dead bodies. I just thought this is so morbid, I've got to go. The guru had this aura about him that was suffocating. It was like having hot cottonwool pressed on your head. I was in this spiritual bubble and I had to get out of it, because I don't need it. That was the feeling I had: I don't need this. I have always known what I was doing in my life ever since I can remember. I know who I am. I am so sorted in my life right now, more than I ever have been, so stop judging me. I was just freaked out. When the guru turned his back to go, I cried and cried, I couldn't believe it. I have never cried so hugely or violently in my life. I kept thinking I know who I am, I know who I am, how dare you think that I don't."

A five-day visit was cut short to two hours. The incident has all the hallmarks of a defining point in her life, post Titanic. It was a moment when she could have sunk or swum. Jim wasn't there, but he took a call in Morocco half an hour later. "Something major had happened," he remembers. "It was a traumatic conversation. She was breathless and had difficulty talking. We both had to reassure each other of what we were doing in general, that we had taken the right moves for the year."

For the moment, Kate moves in the right direction, keeping in close contact with Hollywood while shoring up her reputation as a serious actress. Yes, she has been turning down lucrative offers, no, she is reluctant to give details. "The temptation is always there. You think, wow, you have never thought of that kind of money."

In one of her first interviews, after the release of Heavenly Creatures, she said that the transition from being a girl to a woman had happened very quickly. When she was 17, she felt 22. Later, when she was 19, she felt 29. Now, she says, she feels right. "I am 23 and that's the age I feel. I just feel really young and silly and happy." She gestures in Jim's direction. "And it's because of us that I feel so contented."

These days, as she said, she knows exactly who she is. And now India knows, too.

@copyright/Jon Stock

Source: The Week