by Robert Crampton

She may be the youngest person to have won two Oscar nominations, but Kate Winslet is no Hollywood waif. Here the home girl shows Robert Crampton what she's made of. Portrait by Robert Erdmann.

Near the end of our hour in November at the Dorchester, I asked Kate Winslet: "And you're going to get married next year?" She's a good actress - I've replayed the tape a few times, and there is no hint of a hiccup. She said: "This is the plan, yeah. We're trying to set our date at the moment. I can't wait, I'm so excited." She couldn't wait either: a few days later she was on the front page of every newspaper in the country with her new husband, Jim Threapleton - first in a country churchyard in Reading, her home town, then later having bangers and mash and bakewell tart and custard at the Crooked Billet pub. Ah well.

I don't think she would have enjoyed the fib. Although she had the usual, depressing, celebrity complaints about the press - for her they centre on our obsession with her weight, which we'll come to - she has not, at 23, become a cynic. Talking to her felt like talking to (or, more accurately, listening to) a real person - our mutual connivance in this publicity production line notwithstanding. A young, self-confident, middle-class English person. A student just back from her summer on a kibbutz, perhaps. Or a backpacker encountered on a train, putting the world to rights. Much of what she said could be lifted out of its context and used to make her sound silly or pretentious. This makes her painfully open to being, in the parlance of my trade, stitched up. She has been once or twice already and will be again. But not here. Unless you believe in sneering at someone for being young and eager and full of beans, there is nothing to sneer at.

She is an enthusiast and empathisiser. She did not use one "very" or "really" or "absolutely" where three will do. To render her speech with full precision would bring protests of overwork from the italic function on this keyboard. The exclamation mark wouldn't be happy either. For instance, her new film, Hideous Kinky - from Esther Freud's memoir of her time as a hippy-child in Morocco - is "so poignant", "so brave", and she is "so, so pleased" to have done something which is "so, so different from Titanic". She loves acting, loves the life, loves the travel, but believes that it is vital not to work all the time because (philosophical tone) "life is so important, so important".

She is sensible. She is rooted in a big, happy family. She is keen to be down-to-earth, and for the most part she is down-to-earth. When I met her I asked her what she was wearing so I could describe it for those who like that detail. "A black Joseph suit and a T-shirt I bought in Australia for about $ 20." That combination says: enjoying success in an understated way, not letting it go to her head. If this combination were calculated, then it would be irritating. I don't think it is calculated. (And neither do more jaded observers - the coverage of her down-home wedding was nothing short of ecstatic, The Sun's "Radiant Kate brought genuine warmth to a freezing Britain" being typical.) For the record, she was also wearing black, high-heeled suede boots. Anything else I should know about the boots? "I bought them in Australia, er, from a shop." (Excellent response to poor-quality question.) She talks about things that happened to her when she was 17 - such as her breakthrough film Heavenly Creatures - as ancient history. The early Nineties, let alone the Eighties, are a far-off land. She was born in 1975! She did her GCSEs in 1991! (Four As, 3Bs and a C - "and I could have done better but I was working so it was tricky"). When we were discussing her character's motivation for going to Morocco, she said: "She wanted adventure, colour. They were all doing it then, Lenny Hendrix and all that lot. Is that right?" Before I have the chance to say er, no, actually, she says: "Yeah it is", and on we go. She says that she and Leonardo DiCaprio have "lots of worky, lifey conversations" and I can well imagine it.

But it is also significant that he "will call me for advice about something", yet she does not mention it happening the other way around. She was one of those girls who grew up quickly, wanted responsibility and got it. Although success has come early, she was ready for it. "I started working when I was 13. My heart was so in it." She is not one of those performers who perform because their parents got it so wrong they left their child with a craving for affection and attention. Rather, her parents got it very much right, enabling their girl to take her place in the adult world while still, numerically, very young. Fond memories of what must have been a short childhood pour forth. She says hers was a bit like the girls in Hideous Kinky. "It wasn't hippy and it wasn't breadline and desperate, like them, but there was just that sense of holiday, y'know?" She has specialised so far in parts that require a girl who was almost a woman and jolly-well-more-grown-up-than-you-think-I-am (Rose in Titanic, Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and, show-stealingly, Sue Bridehead in Jude). In this new film she plays a woman a little older than herself, a mother. For the first time in a long time she is not seen in a corset and big dress, although Hideous Kinky, set in 1972, almost qualifies as costume drama. She is a convincing mother, too. Her own mother is a qualified nanny, so she grew up "with loads of kids running around. I do understand kids and people say, 'Oh, you're great with kids'." She will have children herself, "but not just yet".

She looks a bit like Madonna used to look in her heyday: strong features, strong bones, healthy rather than beautiful. There the similarity ends. She did not flirt. "I'm a home girl," she says at one point. "I'm completely a home girl. I want to see the underwear in the underwear drawer and not shoved in some bag somewhere." She would never move to America. "There was a time when lots of people were saying, Why don't you get an apartment in LA? And I was like, 'Why? What for?'" As in many of her roles, in the flesh she gives out this mixture of an old-fashioned femininity and an old-fashioned, tomboyish feminism that could have seen her, in a different age, doing plucky, unladylike things in the W X empire, incurring official displeasure without threatening serious destabilisation. If there is damage or complication there, I failed to spot it.

By rights, there ought to be some of both. As a teenager, she was an overweight, talented, less-well-off pupil in the sort of private theatre school where other girls were regularly "going off for two weeks in Barbados" and "I'd never even heard of Barbados". She says, and here, untypically, she falters: "Because it was a private school, um, this was sort of, like, a huge sort of big, um, just a huge thing in my family, just that one of us was going to go to private school and how could we afford that and that kind of thing." I wonder whether her lack of fluency indicates some guilt at her own good fortune in being the one who, for whatever reason, got to go.

At this school - Redroofs in Maidenhead - she was "mentally bullied" for a time - name-calling ("Blubber"), ostracism, other girls ganging up. She says: "I would just sit there and think, 'Let this make you stronger.'" She could draw on the priceless asset of always having known what she wanted to do. She was and is very ambitious - but not, I think, ruthlessly so. Her father was - is - a professional actor. He has struggled - "He did work, Dad, just not big stuff." An uncle, too, was an actor, and one set of grandparents, and now both sisters.

"I took it so seriously, the whole acting thing," she says. "I was doing a musical with my older sister, we were really tired, we wouldn't go home till 11pm. Once, mum just said, 'Take the day off school today'. I remember going to school the next day and one girl was being really funny with me. I said, 'What's the matter'? She said, 'My mum thinks it's really bad that your mum lets you have days off school and she says what about your education?' and I turned round to this girl - at the age of nine - and I said, 'What about my career?' But I didn't say it in any kind of snooty way, I really meant that and why couldn't she understand that? It was very important to me."

What she calls her "quiet determination" saw her through various girls being "absolutely foul to me". That and the fact that she had other friends. The "phenomenal cattiness" got to her enough for her to plot revenge. Unlike most of us, she got the opportunity to exact it. "I had this fantastic thing happen," she says. "I'm smirking because it was so funny. After I'd done Sense and Sensibility and I'd been nominated for the Oscar and things like that... I was Christmas shopping with my mum and we walked into John Lewis and I saw this girl behind the Clinique make-up counter who was the ringleader of this bunch of people the bullies . I said to my mum, 'I want to go and say something.' She said, 'No Kate, don't!' I think she thought I was going to hit her or something but I'm not a violent person. I said, 'No let's just go and say hello.' "So I walked up and said adopts phoney friendly tone , 'Hello, how are you?' She said, 'Oh fine, how are you?', bit panicky because she remembered how much of a bitch she'd been and suddenly I was a bit well known and she felt very embarrassed, and I said mock-casual , 'So, working at Clinique then?' This girl was going to be a model and have horses and her dad was going to buy her a car if she grew her fingernails and all this stuff and I said, 'Don't you want to be a model or a dancer?' She said imitates whiney voice , 'No, I'm just waiting for, um, y'know a couple of contracts to come in and just doing this for the time being', and I said, 'Oh great', and she said, 'Things good for you then?' and I said bright and breezy , 'Yeah, they are - and I just want to say thanks for being such a bitch 'cos you made me much much stronger so thanks a lot', and just walked off! And I thought, 'Yeeees! Come on!'" She punches the air.

She catches herself sounding a bit harsh. Her voice softens. "It wasn't unkind and it made me feel really, really good because she had been horrible and she had made my life she pauses over the right form of words not nice to live for a while for absolutely no reason." Good story: if she'd done that number on the Clinique girl after Titanic, as a major star, it would not reflect well on her. As a minor star, as she then still was, around 1995-96: fair play, I suppose, yet I can't help feeling a bit sorry for that girl, one minute minding her own business at John Lewis, the next getting a kicking from out of nowhere. Persecutors, take note.

We return to the subject of her weight. She rails against the press for a while. She says oh, it's boring, and please, not another article about being fat, but she rapidly W X becomes impassioned. She jumps up. "Look! I'm like normal size, right? Normal size! It's just such a load of shit! Part of me just thinks, I wanna say, 'Look, I'm the youngest person that's ever been nominated for two Oscars. There's your proof.'" Are you? "Yes I am actually, which someone on a chat show in America pointed out. And I don't walk around waving that 'I've-been-nominated-for-Oscars' flag. I'm not that kind of person, um, but there's your proof! You don't have to be a fing stick insect to be a successful actor. It drives me fing mad. It doesn't stop."

She talks about the pressure placed on young girls and the dangers of anorexia. "You ask any man, 'Do you like someone with a shape or someone with a flat chest?' and they say, 'Oh no, give us something to get hold of!' Don't you? Eh?" Yes, I croak, suddenly throaty. "Yeah!" she roars. "It's like: that's the way we're meant to be, hello? I've got a bust! I've got a bum! At the beginning of the year 1998 , I was 'so fat'. And then a month ago, I'm the body of the year, by some opinion poll. You just think: 'What are you on about?' I didn't go 'hooray', I just thought what's going on? Why are they even voting about bodies? So what! Who cares? Who cares? Let's face it, the world isn't gonna be here for much longer, bloody well get on and live our lives!" But, I say, your weight was an issue when you were younger. "When I was 15 I was very big. I was fat. I wasn't unhappy." How come you were fat? "I just used to eat! I come from a family of people who love their food. I knew that if I wanted to work I would have to lose the weight." At 16, she weighed 13 stone. "Bit of a tank." She went to Weightwatchers and lost three and a half stone. Then, at 18, a director asked her to lose 10lb in ten days. "He said: 'It's an American thing, men love to see the chiselled cheekbones' and I said, look, I exercise, I eat healthily, I've lost a lot of weight and I don't think I want to put my body through anymore, actually. But I'll give it a go. Then I got very in my head about it and I think I read somewhere that Keanu Reeves had lost loads and loads of weight for Little Buddha and I think I thought that weight loss was part of it being an actor . I thought, well OK. Got so ill! So thin! So tired. Terrible, terrible state. I was a bone, it was horrible."

She was down to an apple a day. Then it got worse. "I was going off to do some press for Heavenly Creatures in America and I thought, 'Right, OK, Americans, weight loss', and then I got so thin, so thin. And passed out. Had a blind panic attack where I couldn't see." She was 7st 10lb. And what does she weigh now? "Absolutely no idea, couldn't tell you. Waste of time in the morning. I got very very ill and frightened myself and sorted it out. I wasn't one of the extreme cases. Now, I'm sort of cured of all that. I just got fed up spending at least 70 per cent of my thought space every day on myself... I just snapped out of it."

She smoked roll-ups throughout our interview. I should have asked if cigarettes replaced overeating, but it's only just occurred to me now. I did ask if she drank much. "I'm like everyone - I love a drink. But I don't enjoy getting drunk. I'm a bit of a control freak so I don't like the feeling of out of control. I've never taken any drugs in my life, I really haven't. Not even a drag of a joint. Just can't be doing with that. Also I didn't go to university, that's where you do Ecstasy or coke or whatever." But film sets are too? "Yes, film sets are too, but - I don't know why but I think people must see that I'm just absolutely not a drug taker. No one's ever offered me anything at work, never ever. But apparently they are very druggie places. Maybe I'm just completely blind and naive. I think I am quite naive about drugs. Well I am. Don't know what they are, don't know what they do. Don't really want to. It's like I get enough from my life, thank you."

Where does the control-freakishness come from? Are the rest of the family like that? "No, they're not really. I've always been quite an organised person. Being introduced to the film world at such a young age I had to look after myself a bit." She says that she protected her family from "what a film was really about". She does not elaborate. "I didn't want to give them the baggage, so I'd deal with it very much myself. I used to do my own tax and things. I've always had quite a mathematical brain."

Protecting her family, particularly protecting her elder sister Anna, evokes as much passion as the saga of Titanic Kate, size 14. I mention a (spectacularly bitchy) story in the papers which said that Anna resented Kate's success. She says: "I just want to say right here that is absolute bollocks. I will swear on my entire family's life. I have never, ever, ever had a problematic relationship with any of my family members. We're incredibly close." She goes on to praise her sister's abilities lavishly, unstintingly.

Does she feel guilty about her success? "Yeah, yeah, I do feel guilt. I think Christ, why can't I share this out?" She says that Anna would have been better in her current role than she is. I am sure she means it. She says: "I have such a thick and tight family behind me. If I did go and change and think that I was a star I would get severely hammered for it."

People think that celebrities, especially performers, must be selfish, self-indulgent, wild, egotistical people. The more I meet, the more I think they are more often the opposite: straight, focussed, hard workers who get the drive necessary to maximise their talent from a sense of responsibility to something bigger than themselves - a family, a profession, a cause even. It's just a theory. Kate Winslet fits it rather well.

Source: Kate Winslet: Heart of the Ocean Website (no longer online)