Aged just 27, Kate Winslet has become a world-renowned beauty and a triple-Oscar nominated star. Now, with her failed marriage behind her and happily settled with Sam Mendes, she talks to director Richard Eyre about her roles, her boyfriend, and the school bullies who called her 'Blubbler'. Photographed by Regan Cameron.

I'm staring at Kale Winslet’s toe, the toe next to the big toe on her long, narrow foot; a toe now red and swollen with a mysterious infection. Kate can't walk, and I'm cheated out of a lunch with her at the River Cafe. Nevertheless, it's not exactly a hardship to be sitting in the garden of the handsome, wide, white-stuccoed mid-Victorian house in Belsize Park that she's just moved into with the director Sam Mendes. ("We're like teen­agers rattling about in it," she laughs.) Even if her toe is infected, the rest of Kate looks lovely, which is the word that always comes to mind when people ask me what she's like. I always say, "Lovely." And I mean it.

She has, for a start, a lovely face: large cat's eyes, a mouth that's generous in all senses of the word, an unfashionably real nose, fine Slavic cheekbones and skin like a white peach. As she talks, lit by mottled sunlight filtering through a copper beech, her face changes: tragic, jolly, childlike, exotic. Ordinary, it’s the same on screen.

Stupefied by boredom and vodka on a plane, I once watched Titanic twice through. The first time I didn't recognize the actress playing Rose De Witt Bukater. the young heiress with the unwieldy name, {even though I'd seen Sense and Sensibility). The second time, I did recognise her, and I wanted to marvel at an actress who, almost within each frame, could move with such effortless agility from joy to pain, from girl-next-door to princess. She performed alchemy on this leaden film, giving the lumbering sets, callow performances and unconvincing special effects the thing that they so conspicuously lacked - a heart.

When I directed Kate in Iris I sat for months in the editing room, detached like a surgeon, observing her expressive physicality, the skill with which she conscripted each part of her body (eyes, mouth, nose, hands, back, breasts, bottom - even the etcetera) to serve the part she was playing: the young Iris Murdoch. Always conscious of herself, she was never self-conscious. The film was based on the preposterously risky premise that the audience would accept that Kate Winslet (young Iris) was the same person as Judi Dench (old Iris). There was little physical resemblance between them, but it worked. They matched: talent for talent, wit for wit, heart for heart.

Kate is barely 27, and the youngest ever actress to receive three Academy Award nominations. According to magazine polls, she is one of the 50 most beautiful women in the world and the seventeenth sexiest woman in Britain. Yet only a few years ago she described herself to me as being "a fat girl with dodgy hair and tree-trunk thighs". How has she achieved her current state of grace?

Most actors start to act because they're shy or they stammer, or they want to attract attention, or they're searching for requited love. Kate, however, seems to have been born with an almost preternatural self-confidence, bordering on a predestination, knowing, like the Dalai Lama, that she'd been marked out as a special person. Musical prodigies often come from musical families. It's easy to spot them: musical skill is quantifiable. Acting is more subjective and elusive, but since Kate's father was an actor, as well as two of her grandparents and her uncle, her talent was recognised and encouraged, albeit impar­tially. Her two sisters - Anna, the eldest and "the more obvious actress", and Beth, the youngest - have both become actors.

Heavenly Creature: lace dress £1,867, at Dolce & Gabbana. Hair: Sam McKnight. Make-up: Charlotte Tilbury. Nails: Marian Newman. Prop stylist: Adam Dawe. Digital Artwork: Metro Imaging, London. Mongolian Sheepskin: Alma. Fashion Editor: Kate Phelan.

At the age of five, Kate cried when she heard she’d landed the part of the Virgin Mary in the school Nativity play ("It was so important to me"). She graduated to a "loud Cornish fairy godmother”, än extremely demonstrative and frightening dragon”and the Bonnie Langford part in Bugsy Malone. She'd always learn her lines quietly on her own (as she still does) and she'd always behave professionally. She was teased for it at school. "I was amazed." she relates. "What could be more important than the thing I really loved doing?"

When she was 10, her father had a terrible accident. He caught his foot in a coil of rope when taking a large canal boat through a lock in France. The rope tightened and had it not been for the speed of the helicopter ambulance and the skill of the French micro -surgeons, he would have lost his foot. A woman said shortly afterwards. "In a year's time, it'll be as though it never happened." And Kate thought, I'll wait a year, his foot will be normal and he'll be running around the beach with me. "And. of course, that never happened. It was a great lesson for me, what a lie that was... A year later, I felt I'd been betrayed."

The "great lesson", and she still applies it now, is this: never dissemble. I can't tell if that is true of her private life - certainly it’s my experience of her -- but it's true of her acting. She's invariably truthful - a paradox, of course, because all acting is faking, but acting becomes "truthful" when the audience believes in the thoughts and feelings of the character, rather than being distracted by the actor's personality, like a drunken bore at a party.

At an audition at the age of 11, Kate won a place at stage school, but her father was anxious about her becoming a stage-school clone. To convince him that she should go, she pinned him to the sand one day as he lay on a beach in Norfolk. "Dad! Mum and I can’t bear it. I’ve got to get a uniform and tap shoes… Can I go to the school? Yes or no?” Her father gave in. To understand the full force of her argument as she sat on her father’s stomach, you have to understand that she was, as she says, “a fat person”. She was nicknamed Blubber at school, and bullied, locked in the art cupboard. ("Blubber's in the cupboard. Are you crying. Blubber?" She wasn't, incidentally.) By the age of 15, she was at stage school and doing small parts on TV, she weighed almost as much as her age: 13 stone. And at 15 going on 16, she fell in love with a 27-year-old man.

At this point in most narratives you would expect two developments: a protest from the parents and a prodigious loss of weight to please her man - anorexia at the point of a pistol. But what happened was this: her parents and siblings approved of the boyfriend ("they adored him and welcomed him into the family") and her boyfriend loved her as she was.

It was professional vanity that changed her shape. "I was cast in two episodes of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and I was playing the daughter of a sculptress. I was introduced to the woman who was playing my mother. She was enormous, and I realised why I'd been cast as her daughter. And I thought, shit, if I want a shot at playing Alice in Wonderland or Wendy in Peter Pan, I can't do it at this size. I've got to do something about it." So she did, and with the help of her mum, a veteran of Weight Watchers (5ft 11 ins and "strapping"), she dieted for a year and lost three stone. Then she was cast by Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) in Heavenly Creatures; by Ang Lee in Sense and Sensibility and by James Cameron in Titanic. Within three years, she'd become an international star and, perhaps as remarkable, remained uncorrupted by her success.

Talent without character is nothing. For all the luck of her natural gifts, Kate has behaved - at least in her professional life -with uncanny maturity. "I've got an old head on a young body," she says. The relationship with the boyfriend, Stephen Tredre, lasted three and a half years and the age difference never mattered. "I never felt intimidated by him... At theatre school, I understood the teachers so much better than the pupils. I always had patience with older people: I didn't have patience with people of my own age." Like a musical prodigy, she occupied a tidal wave of commercial and romantic hype. “This is for life,” she responded, satisfying the insufferably sentimental appetite of the media for making fiction out of the stuff of real life, and also grasping for a spot of constancy in a world that, for her, seemed to be changing with each new day. Four years later, her marriage is over and she has a daughter, Mia, on whom she dotes, and a new partner, Sam Mendes (ditto). She is rueful, more guarded, less impulsive, and bruised by her discovery that nothing is more satisfying to the British press that the spectacle of the glamorous discomfited, saying ‘Sometimes I wish my life wasn’t so interesting because of my success.”

Media ill-wishers were reporting that Kate and Sam were to split up withint days of announcing they were together and, in addition, suggesting that their affair pre-dated Kate’s all-too-public estrangement from her husband. As the hacks say: I can verify that it didn’t. On the day it was announced (“KATE - ASTROPHE!” SCREAMED THE TABLOID FRONT PAGES), I was working with Kate and she asked me, with achingly contrived casualness, what I thought of the director she had recently met for the first time, “your friend Sam Mendes”. The same friend, coincidentally, who asked me what I thought of Kate Winslet…

I'm happy to think that in some faintly tenuous way I played Cupid by endorsing their evident mutual admiration, and I hope that these two manifestly decent and well-intentioned people are able to find enough time, peace and seclusion together. They have to learn to live a domestic life with a very lively two-year-old girl, with very demanding professional schedules, and with the ever-insistent scrutiny of a press keenly (and obscenely) interested in spotting and charting the fault lines in their relationship. This is stardom’s law of gravity: privacy is exchanged for fame.

There may be those who think that this is only just, but it seems a savage transaction for a very good actress who never flirts with the press with that shameless stay-away-but-don't-stay-too-far tease of the epidemically insecure. There is actually something quite genuinely diffident about Kate. "My skin still crawls if you call me a movie star," she says. “I get embarrassed. I think, don’t be ridiculous. Maybe it's because I'm British. To me, Julia Roberts - that's a movie star. But when people do call me one, that, I think, is an enormous compliment - but my God, is that a responsibility!"

She sees her responsibility as follows. "Two things: I think it's my duty to wave a certain flag about being a normal woman with breasts and a bottom, the right shape and not emaciated... And men love a shape." True. And the second thing? "I don't think you should throw your weight around... I do what I think is right, but I'm always ready to pay the consequences. I'm a confident woman. I know what I want. You don't want to get into an argument with me."

For all her maturity and natural grace, you can still see something of the child in her. something that she probably denied herself in becoming an adult prematurely - the wilful tomboy who wears biker boots, says "bum" and "shit" and "piss", rolls thin cigarettes from her Golden Virginia tobacco pouch and, when asked about her Ben De Lisi dress at the Oscars, says that it is lovely, "but I couldn’t want to go for a pee in it.”

But she's careful - canny, even - about how she dresses on public occasions, which seems to me professional common sense, given that almost everything she wears is judged by a jury of magazine readers who often demon­strate all the benevolence of a lynch mob. With the pick of the world's designers at her foor, she “panics”, but her embarrassment of choice is eased by the advice of her friend and style adviser, Cheryl Konteh. In the end, however, the decision is always Kate's.

She loves dressing up, but most of the time dresses down in jeans and a shirt or T-shirt (today she's wearing Levi's and a pale striped muslin blouse), and even though she enjoys transforming herself, she isn't obsessed by her body and face, claiming, "I don't mind look­ing like a pig." Which, of course, she doesn't. Ever. She rarely visits a gym has only ever had two manicures and one pedicure and, unless it’s a public event, rarely wears more than a touch of blusher and a dab of lipstick. "By rights, I should have shrivelled skin, because I smoke," she says, rolling another, "But I don't. It's thanks to my mother."

Perhaps it seems unfair that Kate has so much good fortune and so many gifts, but they have not been bought without pain or received without gratitude. And for those who feel that all glory should be paid for with pain - well, she has an infected toe. Satisfied? Oh, and she can sing well. • Kate's new film. "The Life of David Gale", is released in March

Source: Vogue, UK - Scans by Allan