From the Archives: Kate Winslet

"One word that always really irritates me is when people say, ‘That person is immensely talented.' It sometimes annoys me because it doesn't just come naturally sometimes. It's hard to do and, believe me, there are mornings when I wake up and go, ‘I really don't want to do this. I really don't feel like it.' It's just the same as any other job, it's just that it's filmmaking and filmmaking can lead to making people into movie stars. But I don't think of myself as a movie star, I think of myself as Kate and try to lead as normal a life as I possibly can, and I think I do for the most part, which is important to me." - Kate Winslet

Has the Winslet girl been tamed? Or has she simply grown up? There were times when the Kate Winslet who sat down for interviews at the swank Four Seasons Hotel in New York resembled the Kate Winslet I'd read about. Yes, she still smokes cigarettes which she rolls herself ("I prefer them") and her fondness for swear words is still intact, but she is a bit more calm and collected than her press clippings would suggest. I keep recollecting the penultimate words of David Lipsky's 1998 cover story for Rolling Stone: "It occurs to me this may be the last non-star interview she gives. . ."

Having never met Winslet during her non-star status, I can only go by what I've read and who I see before me. Yet how can you not change if in the past year you've starred in the Academy Award-winning blockbuster that's broken all box-office records, been ridiculed for possessing a healthy figure in a land awash in stick-thin starlets and gotten married? Change happens, yes, but situations such as fame and marriage may influence how much you change and what you change into.

At 23, she is still as best friend and Sense and Sensibility costar Emma Thompson described, "She is energized and open, realistic, intelligent, and tremendous fun." The openness, however, is not as unguarded as it seems to have once been. She is, if anything, a bit more censorious of herself -- off-the-cuff remarks regarding the British press and working with Titanic director James Cameron might have dictated this -- but when the subject of her newfound status as Mrs. James Threapleton is raised, there is holding her back. "I still can't believe I'm married! It's brilliant!" she gushes out of the blue then breaks into a tickled, robust laugh.

She and Threapleton met in Morocco on the set of her latest release Hideous Kinky on which he served as third assistant director. Despite the fact that Winslet, in the five films that she'd done before she appeared in Titanic, had given three of the performances (Heavenly Creatures, Sense and Sensibility, Jude) of her generation, Threapleton had never seen anything she'd done. "I love that. When I meet people who haven't seen anything I'd done, I just think, ‘Well, good.' It gives you more to talk about [because] there's no preconceived notion."

Winslet admits it was love at first sight on both parts. She recounts their first meeting: she was being driven to the set and he was there to greet her. "He now tells me that, as the car was driving up, he actually turned away because he had this feeling that something was going to happen. The minute I saw him, I was like, ‘Oh God, I know what's going to happen here,'" she smiles. "You don't go to work to find romantic things, you go to work to do work things. So this was sort of a really nice surprise."

Before Threapleton, there was a brief fling with Byronic-featured actor Rufus Sewell but first, and perhaps forever foremost, there was Stephen Tredre, who died of bone cancer two Decembers ago. Winslet flew from Hideous Kinky's Marrakech set to sing at his memorial. Winslet had first met the screenwriter when she was 15 and he 28. Though their relationship only lasted four-and-a-half years, they remained close friends. It was Tredre who convinced Winslet to accept her role in Hideous Kinky and one can't help but wonder if the man Winslet has called her "guardian angel" might have had a hand in leading her heart to Threapleton.

To watch a Winslet performance, you must prepare to be bruised. She acts at full-throttle with a passion that is frightening in its reckless abandon. It is little wonder then that Winslet has amassed her share of battle scars. After playing the emotionally taxing part of murderess Juliet Hume in Heavenly Creatures, she cried for two days with nervous exhaustion. On Sense and Sensibility, she passed out twice from hypothermia and sported a swollen knee and a sprained wrist. Straightjacketed as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's epic Hamlet, she grew bumps the size of ostrich eggs as she banged herself about during her mad scene. Then there was the countless near-drownings and illnesses she experienced during Titanic's grueling shoot.

In comparison, a case of amoebic dysentery was a walk in the park. Winslet spent four days in a London hospital, missing Titanic's London premiere as well as the rounds of press she was scheduled to do. "But everybody [on Hideous Kinky] had it. It was just like, ‘Oh, well, that's another one down. Hey, ho!'" she shares, her voice in all its chipper glory. She returned to Morocco much thinner. "Everything, you know, had gone through my body and it makes you sweat like anything. It's like a Victorian illness, you sweat buckets and buckets and buckets. Very uncomfortable."

Julia, the heroine of Gillies MacKinnon's Hideous Kinky, couldn't be more different than Titanic's Rose Lawson. Based on Esther Freud's semiautobiographical reminiscences of her childhood, the film follows the spiritual odyssey of a young Londoner who transplants her two daughters (played by Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan) to Morrocco. Set in the Sixties, it is a time when the counterculture of sex, drugs and free love was beginning its reign and the seeds of the Me Generation were being sown. Beautifully photographed, the film is held together by Winslet's performance, which is at times immediate and subtle.

"After Titanic, I just wanted to go do something completely different," Winslet admits. "I was looking for something that was British. I am a true Brit through and through, and I wanted to do something that was supporting the ever-rising British film industry that we have. Somehow I bypassed British film completely. I didn't want people to think, ‘Oh, Kate Winslet. Now that she's made it, she's just going to go to Hollywood and live there and do all these Hollywood movies and make millions and millions of dollars.' That's not me and I didn't want people to start thinking that of me, especially my fellow Brit actors."

Winslet easily identified with the lifestyle and upbringing her character was attempting to provide for her daughters. While Winslet's own childhood was not as nomadic, "we had sort of that kind of existence. It was always a case of pack everything into the car, as much as you can, and just go. Just start driving through farms and staying in campsites, or visiting friends of my parents that worked on canal boats in France, all these kinds of wonderful things! I'm so grateful for that!"

Winslet is aware that today's judgmental society may disapprove of her character's maternal choices. Dragging your children through Morocco isn't the most selfless act and her daughter Bea is adamant about maintaining some semblance of normalcy, if not returning to London altogether. At one point, she even insists her mother leave her with a couple who puts them up in their luxurious mansion. "You have to just remember this is the late Sixties, early Seventies and it was very much the hippie thing to be doing, and lots of people were doing it," Winslet responds. "They were always looking out for each other as well, so I think there was a lot more trust going on in the world at that time, and it's a shame that that really isn't there anymore."

Winslet further reflects, "It's hard to know how people are going to respond. The one thing that was important to me was that I know that the way in which she brings up the children could be perceived by some as slightly irresponsible. Having met Bernadine Freud (the author's mother, on whom Julia is based), it wasn't about that. When [Julia] left her daughter while she went off to the Sufi college -- I can understand exactly what she was doing there. It was very much a case of her daughter not wanting to go. I don't think she wanted to rock her daughter's happiness. I think she realized that it was something her daughter wanted to do and she'd been adult enough to make that decision. It was hard for [Julia]."

Winslet and Threapleton have no plans to enter into parenthood. "We're too young, we want more time to do things together," she says. For now, Winslet will plod on with her career. While she awaits the release of her next feature -- Jane Campion's Holy Smoke where she plays a 20-year-old Aussie who falls sway to a religious cult -- and the commencement of her next soon-to-be announced project, Winslet will spend her time basking in her status as a newlywed and fielding questions about Leonardo DiCaprio.

It's strange to note how DiCaprio dominates many of Winslet's interviews while no mention of Winslet can be found in his post-Titanic statements. Granted, he's been too busy partying to indulge the press' desire to interview him. This observation is not a reflection of the two's friendship but rather how Hollywood and the media chooses to enshrine the prodigiously talented DiCaprio as its golden boy while it excoriates Winslet for her curvaceous figure even as it extols her undeniable talents and artistic stance.

How comforting, then, that Winslet hasn't lost her penchant for selecting roles for their artistic rather than commercial value. "I don't have an agenda. It's always whether the story is strong and the character grabs me and I think would be a challenge for me. I'd never do something I thought I could do standing on my head. If it's something that's going to be beneficial to me as an actor, stretch me as an actor -- I'm only 23 and have got a lot to learn about acting. I think you can never stop learning in anything. You can never stop learning things in life and there's one life that we have and I think you have to grab what you can from it and just run with it."