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On Mia:
"She's a Libran -- not that I actually believe that much in star signs, but I'm a Libran and I'm sociable, I love people, and she's the same. She's fascinated by new faces and new environments."

Kate Winslet embraces the 20th century in her new movie Enigma but, Helen Barlow finds, the down-to-earth actress still prefers the challenges of a corset to a modern film

DESPITE her status as one of Britain's most venerated film stars, the name Kate Winslet and the phrase 'contemporary drama' make uneasy bedfellows. From Titanic to Quills, via literary adaptations such as Michael Winterbottom's Jude and Ang Lee's Sense And Sensibility, Winslet's English-rose looks and forthright acting style have found favour among the period-drama set but she has yet to star in a significant modern film. Only Jane Campion's Holy Smoke has found her in a contemporary setting. Not for her the challenges of a Nil By Mouth or an Intimacy. Not yet, anyway.

'I'd love to find something great and contemporary but I wouldn't just do that for the sake of it. It would have to be the right thing,' says the 26-year-old. 'No-one had more fun than I did doing Holy Smoke. I loved just being a normal human being, not having to wear a corset every bloody day and being able to move around with no shoes on. That was fantastic. That's much more me.'

Her new film, the Mick Jagger- produced Enigma, premieres at the Edinburgh International Film festival this week. Once again, it sees Winslet climbing into something her great-grandmother might have worn. The story of Bletchley Park's code- breakers, it does at least, take place in the 20th century, during the second world war. Winslet gives a good- natured laugh. 'I'm getting there,' she quips. 'Enigma's world war two.'

This is the third time we've met and, as usual, Winslet manages to look captivating and ordinary at the same time, her hair pulled back to reveal her peaches-and-cream complexion and a radiant look to her eyes. Nothing about her clothes conjures up a designer image yet you still can't tear your gaze from her. When she talks, it's very, very fast, her enthusiasm brimming over with every word as she talks about Enigma, working with Jagger, her husband Jim Threapleton, and the couple's 10-month-old baby, Mia, who Winslet was carrying while filming Enigma.

It's with less enthusiasm, however, that she broaches the question of the media furore surrounding her post-pregnancy weight. 'True, I gained 50 or 60 pounds when I was pregnant, so of course I'm not going to get a job when I've just had a baby and I've got a stomach that hangs down to my knees,' she says. 'I wanted to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight and that's what I've done. The fact is I didn't go on a diet because I was breast-feeding Mia and you can't diet when you're breast-feeding because the baby doesn't get the right nutrients. But I'd hate myself skinny. I've been skinny. It's f***ing boring. And Jim wouldn't fancy me any more. As it is, he keeps wondering where my tummy's gone, where all the bumps are that he liked when I was pregnant.'

But she has nothing but praise for Jagger. 'Mick is everything you'd want him to be. He's fabulous but I'd also have to say I think it's very difficult being someone like Mick, being so famous and breaking into making movies. People would naturally be very cynical about why he's doing that. Is he doing it just because he wants to stick his name on something else or is it because he genuinely wants to make films? And, in Mick's case, the latter is true. He was a really good producer.'

Unlike some producers with whom Winslet has worked, Jagger even appeared on set. 'It was pouring down with rain and he was there with his umbrella like everybody else, getting on with it, mucking in, and he was just fantastic. He has a very good sense of family. Don't believe everything you read because all I can say about Mick is that he adores his kids and he loves Jerry [Hall]. He's a really solid individual. He's got it right. He really has.'

A strong sense of family is something Kate Winslet appreciates. She remains close to her parents -- both stage actors -- and to her siblings. She has two sisters, who both act, and a brother. It was natural she would follow in the family tradition. 'I grew up in a large family of people who were fun-loving, unemployed actors who never had much money, with everybody sticking together and making the most of what we had. I was always surrounded by a lot of love and I always knew that I wanted to act.'

Winslet made her screen debut at 11, dancing opposite the Honey Monster in an advert for Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal. She followed this with training at a theatre school. She was still in her teens when she was cast in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures but the maturity of her performance as teen murderer Juliet Hulme astounded audiences, critics and Emma Thompson, who insisted Winslet be cast in Sense And Sensibility. The pair became friends and Thompson -- equally effusive and down-to-earth -- was the only celebrity at Winslet's wedding, which took place in her local church. Afterwards, guests ate bangers and mash at a pub and the couple went hiking in the Highlands for their honeymoon.

The understated event was partly a reaction to the newfound celebrity created by the massive success of Titanic. 'Everything turned upside-down for a while [after Titanic] and I didn't want that amount of pressure being put on me because I wasn't liking my job any more. I remember thinking, 'I've got to turn this around because, otherwise, I'm going to suffer as a person and as an actor.' So I made a conscious decision to find something tiny, tiny, tiny to do. Hence Hideous Kinky, because I just needed to go and do a film that nobody approved of, that everyone thought was a ridiculous idea, and just for myself. It was shooting in Morocco and it was in the sunshine and I could get a suntan and play around with two lovely girls for 12 weeks. And, if I hadn't have done that, I wouldn't have met Jim [third assistant director on the film]. So it was good all round.'

While she has rarely spoken about it, Winslet had another, more personal reason for doing Hideous Kinky -- one that explains why she passed over the leads in Shakespeare In Love and Anna And The King in the process. Esther Freud's novel of the same name, on which the film was to be based, had been given to her by her previous boyfriend, TV producer Stephen Tredre, whom she had met when he was 28 and she was 16 but who later died of cancer. He had always urged her to make the film. She, in turn, has called him her 'guardian angel'. Hideous Kinky and its Moroccan location gave Winslet a taste for exotic experiences and she went backpacking in northern India to prepare for her following role, Holy Smoke. But she was recognised even there.

'People seemed to have access to my life and my private life,' she says. 'But now I know how lucky I was, and what is so life-affirming is that people in tiny Indian villages saw Titanic. Partially blind Indian men walking with their walking sticks knew who I was in the Himalayas. They looked at me going, 'You! Titanic!'. They knew who I was. They loved the film. It gave them so much, and I'm really, really grateful for that.'

It seems Mia may inherit her mother's sense of adventure as she travels with Winslet to her mother's film sets of the future. 'She's fantastic,' Winslet beams. 'She's a Libran -- not that I actually believe that much in star signs, but I'm a Libran and I'm sociable, I love people, and she's the same. She's fascinated by new faces and new environments.'

One old face with whom Winslet is working is Geoffrey Rush, who is filming The Magician's Wife with her in Morocco. Winslet and Rush starred in Quills, Philip Kaufman's take on the Marquis de Sade and a film that required Rush to spend most of the time unclothed. 'When he was walking around naked, it just really didn't occur to me,' Winslet recalls. 'I don't know why. Geoffrey will be furious to think that I didn't notice he was stark naked. He'll be absolutely mortified.'

The Magician's Wife, based on a novel by Brian Moore, is helmed by Fran¨ois Girard, the Quebec director who has also directed a play in the Edinburgh International Festival. The film sees Winslet play the high-born wife of a French illusionist sent to quell an uprising in north Africa. Another contemporary role at last for the period-drama queen? No, the man sending Rush and his wife south in this film is none other than Napoleon. 'The female roles are just stronger in period films. I read as many contemporary scripts as I do period ones.' She shrugs. 'But the period ones just get me every time.'

Part of the Film Festival, Enigma screens on August 18 and 19

Source: The Sunday Herald (Scotland)