Kate Winslet: Kiss Us, Kate

Titanic star Kate Winslet, the actress many consider the most talented of her generation, talks about the dangers of acting, the joy of passion and the pleasure of knowing Leonardo DiCaprio.

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Long before young Kate Winslet made such a searing impression as the willful, passionate heroine who twice careens from stem to stern of Titanic, first intending to hurl herself into the sea, then later trying to save herself from it, she was so equated with intensity that her close friends used her surname as an adjective for high emotion. Word has it that whenever she reaches a fever pitch or displays a fit of zeal, her pals quip, "Very Winslet of you." Or, on a day of blustery English weather, one of them is likely to say, "We're having a Winslet sort of day, aren't we?"

Winslet's Titanic director, James Cameron, marveled that she sometimes cried for a solid hour after a big emotional scene, and Ang Lee, who earlier directed her Oscar-nominated performance in Sense and Sensibility, apparently found her such a whirlwind that he prescribed tai chi and Austen-era poetry to calm her. She's that volcanic, that undefended against her own deepest feelings.

But make no mistake. Kate Winslet is not free-firing raw emotion personified. She is too talented and too highly trained to be merely, as she describes herself, "instinct on legs." James Cameron believes she's simply one of the most gifted actresses of her generation, an opinion held by many and backed up by a list of awards hardly to be believed for an actress 22 years old. She was born into a theatrical family in Reading, England, which had her living and breathing the life of a performer from day one. Her father is a struggling actor who ran the Reading Repertory. Her mother acts as well, and is the daughter of two actors. Her two sisters both act. Winslet's parents sent her at age 11 to the local theater school, and by 13 she had won her first acting job, dancing with the Honey Monster in a well-known Sugar Puffs commercial. She then did musical theater and sitcoms, and quickly moved to the stage, where, as a young teen she was already a full-fledged star and celebrity. Then, she brought it all to bear in movies.

When Kate Winslet, having beat out 175 other hopefuls for the part, made her film debut at 17 playing the affected New Zealand schoolgirl who toys with lesbianism and then takes matricide seriously in Heavenly Creatures, her performance was so original and so convincing in its chilly aplomb that people left the theater asking, Who was that? Ang Lee quickly cast her as the emotionally reckless young sister to Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. In Michael Winterbottom's Jude, she played the fearsomely intelligent Sue, a Thomas Hardy heroine no one else Winslet's age could probably have touched. Kenneth Branagh then chose her for his luminous Ophelia in Hamlet.

In casting the part of Rose in Titanic, James Cameron was biased against Winslet because she'd done three period pieces already. He wanted a girl with no such history. But after she read for him, he never thought about the matter again, and she proved his faith justified. The all-the-stops-out longing she shows for Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic packs the heat of a bravura turn by one of the silent screen's great beauties. You can't imagine any of her contemporaries handling the role. That alone should keep her in the spotlight for quite some time, so long as she doesn't take up residence in the east wing of Helena Bonham Carter Manor.

Why don't Hollywood and the media blather on about Kate Winslet the way they do about, say, Winona Ryder, Claire Danes or Gwyneth Paltrow? Probably because she is seldom in Hollywood, and hardly anybody knows about it when she is. She almost never plays the movie star. My first glimpse of her comes one early morning when she strides into the living room of her Peninsula Hotel suite, forthrightly thrusting out her hand and heartily welcoming me in great, mile-a-minute bursts of chat that suggest Emma Thompson on uppers.

"I'm a hardened Brit--I cannot do without my nicotine and coffee," she growls, plunking herself down on the sofa and adroitly rolling a cigarette to accompany her fresh orange juice and croissants. She is preternaturally poised, shit-kicker boots and disarranged hair notwithstanding. And she has an old-soul wisdom in her eyes that also belies her years. These are the qualities that make her "Winslet" emotionalism a far more interesting phenomenon than mere temperament.

"So, are you really given to the intensity in your real life that you bring to the screen?" I ask.

"I am incredibly passionate about my life," she proudly asserts. "I am absolutely unable to hide any emotion. If I wrote a book, I'd have to call it P is for Passion. I don't go in for anything halfway. My feelings about things are instant, on the spot. And my heart is always, always on my sleeve."

"Are you going to let loose with any of that intensity while you're here in Hollywood? Go out on the town clubbing later? Or to a party, perhaps with some young American actor?"

Winslet flashes me a wry, incredulous look, laughs, and shakes her head in a resolute no. "What I am doing is getting on a plane for home right after the photo shoot, because I will not stay here for any longer than I need to." She tosses in a little stage shudder to underscore that she's not kidding. "Just coming here to Los Angeles--well, let's say, I find it suffocating. I mean, when I flew here to take my mom and dad to the Oscars, I thought I was going to go crazy. I really dislike the glamour side of the business that's so prevalent here, the 'constant attention' thing."

She has no interest in the joys of Young Hollywood? "I've never gotten enough inside 'Young Hollywood' to become part of the club, as it were," she says. "Leonardo gets cross with me whenever I come here. He says, 'Hey, sweetie, I'm going to get a whole bunch of friends together to hang out, OK? And I just go 'Ugh.' Half the time, I'm tired from the plane trip. He's furious with me right now. But the possibility of going to places like the Skybar frightens me because it is so the 'Young Hollywood' thing to do. It doesn't really interest me, and, honestly, it's difficult for me to adapt to situations like that. And the whole drug thing frightens me, too. It's such a very big thing, something I'm becoming increasingly more aware of, both here and at home.

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