Steady as She Goes

February 10–17, 2000

by Sam Adams

Even after Titanic’s success, Kate Winslet still has her head on straight.

It’s a bizarre fact of the way Hollywood works that two people can be in the same blockbuster and yet only one of them — the "star" — gets the credit for making it a hit. There’s a negligible difference to the amount of time Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio spend on screen in Titanic, and you could make the argument that her performance is both more difficult and more crucial to making the movie work. Yet Titanic was Leo’s coronation, not Winslet’s, and he’s certainly stepped up to the plate, with all the arrogance and bad behavior (not to mention salary) due a newly anointed star.

Winslet, by contrast, is as down-to-earth and unpretentious as actors get. Instead of seeking out would-be hits for her Big Ship follow-up, she’s chosen a series of uniformly challenging and even uncommercial projects. Apart from Holy Smoke, which opens this week, there was last year’s Hideous Kinky, and coming up, the screen version of Doug Wright’s play Quills (which stars Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade) and an adaptation of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.

Entering a conference room at the Manhattan Hyatt, Winslet is unfazed by even the most insipid of questions from the dozen reporters present, leisurely rolling her own cigarettes, occasionally brushing her combed-straight hair back from her face. A self-described "soap and water girl" (this comes in response to a People question about her favorite beauty products), she seems the exact opposite of Ruth, her Holy Smoke character, a young Australian woman who flees to India in search of spiritual answers from a guru named Baba, only to be lured back home and subjected to deprogramming by a cocky, slick American (played by Harvey Keitel).

It turns out that such self-assurance hasn’t come easy for Winslet. In fact, she recalls, "When I was 18 [or] 19, I thought that I was actually going mad. I really was so confused by who I was. I’d started acting and that was fantastic, but who was I in that? What was my identity?"

It comes as no surprise that Winslet’s response to this period of self-doubt was the direct approach: "I sort of pushed myself through, thinking ‘I’ll go through this lonely bit, I’ll go through this suicidal bit, and I’ll come out the other side and I’ll be OK.’"

Winslet credits her "really stable upbringing," something Ruth surely lacks, for giving her the "security" to stand her ground, but despite the differences between them, she says she identifies strongly with the impetus of Ruth’s search for meaning, if not its specific terms. "I was just like Ruth when I was her age," she says.

"I don’t have any specific religious or spiritual beliefs," Winslet admits. "I mean, I believe there is something that is dictating what is going to happen in our lives — I don’t know exactly what that is but it’s something that’s out there somewhere."

By contrast, "Ruth’s spiritual beliefs are very determined, but on the other hand, she could have gone to India and met Patrick Swayze or Brad Pitt. It was a specific time in her life that made her feel this heightened emotional thrill when she was touched by Baba, but it could just as easily have been somebody else. It’s very specific for young women to be looking for something, looking for the answer, and sometimes the answers that they think they’ve found are the wrong ones."

Holy Smoke opens Friday at Ritz East. See Sam Adams’ review.