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Shocking, erotic and occasionally depraved, Kate Winslet is about to be seen in her most controversial role ever. Sarah Bailey talks to her about on-screen sex and off-screen romance.

Los Angeles. Kate Winslet is in Full Kate mode. Swooning, scowling at shouty producers on their cellphones, drumming the lunch table in hearty appreciation of her own funny, saucy, very kate egg joke: 'Chicken and egg lying in bed, just finished having sex. Chicken lies back, lights a cigarette and says, 'That answers that one, then.' 'Do you get it? Do you get it?' demands Kate. 'Harvey Keitel loves that joke. At first he didn't get it, then he came up to me half an hour later killing himself laughing, 'Who came first?...ha!''

Scan Courtesy of Josie's Kate Winslet Site.

Across the patio at the Four Seasons hotel, there appears another beautiful, famous blonde. 'Kate, can I bum a cigarette?' purrs Jessica Lange. 'Oh yes, babe' says Kate, smiley-eyed and sisterly. There's such an A-list glow radiating from our table at this moment, you can probably see us eating our fruit plate with creme anglaise from outer space.

Jessica gone, Kate leans across the table and whispers: 'She's really lovely. I keep bumping into her. Now, she's a sexy woman. God, that's terrible, that looks like I'm friends with the stars. But that's got to go in the article. That's really cool, isn't it? That's brilliant. Oh, I can't wait to call my mates.'

This is Kate Winslet, aka Titian-haired Titanicgoddess. The actress who turned down Shakespeare In Love because it wasn't a 'stretch'. The gorgeous girl who, whether she's skinny-dipping in Cornwall or doing Victoria Cross-worthy nude scenes, has the British press drowning in puddles of their own drool.

Kate is in LA to talk about her new movie Holy Smoke. Before we go any further, it must be said that Kate-24, Reading girl born and bred-is not really an LA person: 'It's always work, pressure, 'What am I going to wear?' You come here and play Spot the Plastic Surgery, Spot the Boob Job. I totally disagree with all that crap.' But despite all this, despite the somewhat puritanical response of sections of the US press to her movie ('They ask the most stupid fucking questions'), Kate is on top form today, 'Really chirpy, happy and fresh'. Which may have something to do with waking up this morning with her husband Jim Threapleton and ordering smoked salmon and scrambled eggs in bed ('so gorgeous'). It may also have something to do with the fact that in Holy Smoke Kate Winslet has given the performance of her short, rather brilliant career; 'I watched it and went, 'I don't even know who that person is on screen,' 'Not something she's ever truly felt before.

It's small wonder that Holy Smoke has given the US press the willies. At the screening I attended in London, several (male) critics left the screening room wearing hot, cross faces and muttering darkly. Directed by Jane Campion, it is a charged, eccentric, occasionally rather depraved film about an Australian girl, Ruth Baroon (Winslet), who falls under the spell of a charismatic

Scan Courtesy of Josie's Kate Winslet Site.

Indian guru, much to the horror of her comically grotesque whitebread Aussie family, who recruit the unlikely survices of PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel), a swagging cult-deprogrammer in tight pants. Once Ruth and PJ are holed up together in a shack in teh desert, a twisted battle of the sexes ensues and it's not long before PJ has unpeeled those pants and is writhering in the dust in a cocktail dress begging for sexual healing. It's messy stuff:complex, dirty and strange-and, for my money, rather erotic. 'I'm really interested when you say erotic, because this film is provoking so many different reactions from people,' says Kate, frowning. 'When Jim and I saw it we were totally stunned for about 24 hours afterwards. It was almost like we had a terrible hangover that just wouldn't go away. We were in a sort of daze. He said 'As a man you don't like Ruth. You don't like what she's up to and you'd quite like to give her a jolly good slap.' As a woman, you're like 'Go on, girl!' and you love her for everything that she is. So when you say erotic, what do you mean? Like really sexy?' Yes, like really sexy, I say. 'Oh my god, we've made a porn film! I never thought abit it like that. Ruth was a young woman who was very unaware of her beauty and sexuality. I think she realised she was really attractive to PJ and she could play with that, but she only did it to get the better of him and degrade him.'

And degrade him she does. In fact the scenes in which Ruth sexually humiliates PJ are pitched somewhere inbetween 'blackly hilarious' and 'too ugly to watch'.

'It is pretty hidoues,' admits Kate. 'But it's bloody funny as well. I had a wonderful time saying, 'Just look at you in your dress'. I had a blast. I mean, I'd never be that rude. I think all of us, as women, would love to be like Ruth. I just loved playing her. Loved it.'

Kate Winslet was born into a family of actors ('You should try being at Sunday lunch, it's like a thousand screaming children'). She made her professional debut aged 11 as the Honey Monster's sidekick in a Sugar Puffs commercial. By 16 she had left school to pursue her careeer with characteristic Kate Winslet vigour and passion (example: Phone James Cameron. Yell 'I am Rose!' repeatedly. Do not give up until you have been cast as the female lead in the highest-grossing movie of all time.)

Kate began her campaign for Holy Smoke five years ago, when she met Jane Campion in Cannes, although it wasn't until 1998 that she was invited to the screen test with Harvey Keitel in New York.

Scan Courtesy of Josie's Kate Winslet Site.

Kate and Mr Keitel (whose reputation for professional intensity exceeds even his co-star's) worked like dogs on the movie. 'Harvey and I always laughed about how ridiculously disciplined we were. We exercised daily, we didn't drink any alchol and we ate really healthily. We knew we had to be 100 percent up there, for every single day of the shoot.'

So by the time they came to shoot the sex scene (so potent and full-on it virtually makes your heart stop), they could approach it more like trained, prepared atheletes than mortally embaressed co-stars. 'We tried to keep a sense of humour about it. When you're doing a scene like that, you have the most bizarre fucking creations covering up your bits and bobs. He had a little covering and I had a little covering and we both had a fucking laugh about that, because we looked really stupid. I know you watch scenes like that and you wonder, 'Are they really doing it?' I mean, I wondered. And now I know, the actors are wearing little coverings, like socks.'

Socks aside, there is another scene in Holy Smoke that must have been even more challenging for Kate. Ruth, who has stared to unravel into madness, stands naked in the desert and-whether she is surrending herself to PJ or seducing him, I couldn't say - she pisses herself. It was filmed, as Kate reminds me, with a shudder, 'Outside. In the red-sand desert. At three o'clock in the morning. Freezing. 'It was an unbelievably difficult scene: walking about absolutely stark-bollock naked. I mean, it's fucking scary. It was the most petrifying thing in my life. It's like me saying to you, 'Stand up naked in front of all these people you don't even know.' Terrifying.'

Since Kate met and fell in love with Jim Threapleton on the set of Hideous Kinky in November 1997 (he was the third assistant director, they married the following November), getting naked on camera seems even weirder than it used to. 'I find thsoe scenes harder and harder to do. I have to say, Jim is completely cool. He's fantastic about it. He knows it's part of my job. It's always me that has the problem with it. Oh, God - I don't want everybody to see my body. It's private, it's as simple as that. It's just that sometimes it's really necessary and that scene was vital. It wouldnt' have been the same film without it.'

I tell her that, if it's any consolation, she looks drop dead gorgeous. She smiles. 'I was quite chuffed when I saw the film. I thought, 'Alright, I look quite nice', because I have all those paranoias we all have.'

Today Kate is wearing Earl jeans (blagged from a shoot), a crisp qhite shirt and black stiletto boots. 'I've just rediscovered my old boot fetish. These ones I'm wearing now are fucking great. They're from Gina - about the only shop in Britain that does true size eights for women.' And from her newly highlighted blonde hair to the tips of her lethally pointy size eights, Kate Winslet looks a)more modern than I expected her to (maybe I just dont' recognise her out of a corset) and b)a glowy, baby-skinned picture of rude svelte health.

Scan Courtesy of Josie's Kate Winslet Site.

'Everyone keeps coming up to me and saying, 'Have you lost weight? Have you been working out?' I find that really rude. Actually, I think I have lost weight but I haven't done anything. I haven't done a stitch of exercise. I cross my heart, because I've got a slipped disc, which is a pain in the arse. 'It's strange,' she muses, 'because I've been eating and drinking everything in sight, just like normal.' Perhaps it's love, I suggest. 'I think it is. I really think it is. Plus my hormones, which change like mad, are calming down a bit. When I met Jim they were like, 'Raaaargh'. 'I was a big hormonal bag for a good six months and I remember feeling like a bit of a nutter. I've been taking the best hormonal balancing thing, Mexican Yam. It's brilliant. Normally I'm absolutely crap with vitamins but I've been taking these religiously.'

Last night, in the hotel bedroom, she confeses she did something she hasn't done for four years. She weighed herself. 'At first I'm like, 'Bloody fucking scales. Throw them out of the window'. Then I got on them and I'm nine and a half stone for God's sake. It's like, duh! (This last explamation meant for the eyes and ears of all the newspaper editors who've ever proclaimed Kate Winslet fat.) 'And then I forgot about it,' says Kate seriously. 'Honestly, it's not something I could give the tiniest fuck about.'

Kate's two-fingered saltue to body fascists everywhere is truly inspiring. In fact, Jennifer Aniston ( who also knows what it's like to be attacked by the Too Fat/Too Thin police) told me she had a picture of Kate stuck to her fridge. When I asked why, she said simply: 'She is one of the good ones.'

'Jim's mum read the script for me last Christmas and said, 'I'm not sure about this, it's a bit like Silence of the Lambs.' I was like, 'Give it me now!' '

But it's not just the defiance about her body image which qualifies Kate for sainthood. THere's also something particularly exhilarating about the roles she plays. Parts that could scream Victim (Jude), Vapid English Rose (Sense and Sensibility), or plain old basket case (Heavenly Creatures, Holy Smoke) become powerful, non-conformist heroines once Kate takes them on. Her next film, Quills (to be released later this year), soudns like no exception. She plays Madeleine, a laundry lass and muse to the Marquis de Sade. 'Jim's mum read the script for me last Christmas and said, 'I'm not sure about this, it's a bit like Silence of the Lambs.' I was like, 'Give it me now!' '

In Quills Kate gets to play opposite Geoffrey Rush, the Marquis ('very naughty'), Michael Caine ('lethal') and Joaquin Phoenix as the priest ('who is just a really darling person').

I ask if she's ever been in danger of falling for one of her leading men. She thinks for a moment before screwing up her face. 'None of them. None of them. I loved Leo, like a brother, but I never ever fancied him. He's great, but he's so silly, a real boy. He needed a lot of looking after.'

As it happened, she bumped into young DiCaprio recently, who was very keen to hear about the production of Quills. 'He said, ' You didn't love Joaquin more than me, did you? Don't you ever love an actor more than you love me.' I said, 'How do you know I even liked you?' He replied, 'Fuck off. You loved me!' '

Kate Winslet loves a lot of things: blackberries, Harvey Keitels remedial joke-telling and pretzels all leap to mind. And yes, Leo DiCaprio, she loves you, too. However, we need to find different level of vocaulary altogether if we are to begin to describe the intensity with which Kate adores her Jim and the joy she feels at being married. 'I just love every single part of it. I love the certainty of it. I love caring about soemone that much. It's gorgeous.'

It was Kate's plan to spend every night of their first year of marriage together 'I was determined to get to one year, but Jim was working on something and had to go away three nights before our first anniversary. It was awful. It was the most traumatic experienec of my life.' (Okay, she's probably exaggerating about that last bit.)

Scan Courtesy of Josie's Kate Winslet Site.

These days Kate and Jim try to take it in turns to work, though they were apart for four months when she shot Holy Smoke. 'I just refuse to be apart from him for that long ever again'.

And Kate, while she's clearly besotted and will unselfconciously yatter away about Jim, has no intention of turning her relationship into a media event: 'The day Jim and I are ever labelled a celebrity couple, I'll just vomit.'

A little snapshot of domestic bliss chez the Winslet - Threapletons which says it all: 'I do worry that I'm turning into a creature of habit because usually in the evening, after we've had dinner or whatever, I'll say to Jim, 'Ooh. Can I put my dressing gown on now?' And I'm in that dressing gown and I love it. I'm all for comfort and being cosy.'

It may seem strange trying to reconcile the different faces of Kate: an actress who sneers in the face of a snivelling degraded man in a dress; a real-life dressing-gown softie; a beautiful young woman who worries what her husband will think and yet puts herself through some of the most gruelling nude scenes ever. But I don't think she's trying to be confusing. In conversation, she can be silly and passionate, romantic and outrageous, but mostly she's just playing, being entertaining. If anything, she's fiercely moral about her work: 'I'd never do anything that had gratuitous sex in it. I'd never do anything that involved rape. I wouldn't do a film that had women being treated badly. They are not interesting, they are horrible. That is what this society should be getting away from.'

At the bottom line, the really great thing about Kate is very simple she's brave.

'My dad always tells a story about us all going on holiday to the sea. We'd all bundle in the back of the car, which would always break down at least twice, and when we got there I'd just have to get into that sea. Decemeber, January, February-I'd just strip off and barrel in there. I had no concept of temperature, cold or anything. I've alwyas been really impulsive like that. I think definitely makes me feel confident when I'm doing really daring thisn in films. And I don't care what people think of me either.' She smiles.

It's great when your'e Kate. Yeah.