Kate Winslet: Kiss Us, Kate

"Somebody said, 'Let's go have a bit of Charley,' and I had no idea what they meant. I've never taken any drugs in my life, never even had a drag on a joint. That makes me sound squeaky clean, but as you see, I make up for it in cigarette smoking and coffee drinking and occasionally going out and getting completely plastered, losing my mind, and waking up the next morning feeling very sorry for myself."

Winslet takes a drag of her cigarette and continues, "I'm an incredible control freak. I think what frightens me about drugs is that I can't bear the idea of losing control of myself, my center. Particularly in a business that is so out of control."

At the mere mention of the Business, Winslet tears into a merry riff, replete with dramatic gestures and impersonations, on Hollywood's out-of-control incongruities, foibles and absurdities. "Anytime I get off the plane here, I dash into Starbucks--which I love so much that I think I'm going to have to open a franchise back home where we don't have them--and as soon as you hit a Starbucks in Los Angeles, you see all these incredibly thin women, toned, no body fat, who stand at the counter and go, 'Can I get a decaf, no milk, and a low-fat scone?'" Her version of the anorexic, check-out-my-implants wannabes she's imitating is dead-on. Switching back to her own plummy tones, she laughs, "And I trot up to the counter, go, very loudly, 'Can I have a latte, please, extra hot, and one of those maple nut oat scone things? Actually, I'll get two of them!'"

Winslet declares herself incensed by the attention young Hollywood women pay to weight and bust size. "At 19, I went from pillar to post about my body and spent at least 95 percent of my head-space every day thinking about what I bloody looked like," she says. "When I was making Sense and Sensibility, Emma Thompson noticed that I'd skip lunch and not eat properly. She said, 'If you dare try and lose weight for this job, I will be furious with you.' She went out and bought me The Beauty Myth, and since then, I've been much more relaxed about that side of it. But, my God, the young women in Los Angeles!"

Winslet drags hard on her cigarette and exhales skyward. "Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures suited to a fantasy world. Acting is about being real, being honest. Ultimately, the audience doesn't love you or want to be with you because of what your face looks like or because of the size of your backside. They've got to love you because of the honesty within your soul. As an actor, for me to conform physically in such a way would just be taking me to a plane of complete unreality, which is not what it's about. I would be doing everything that I always said I would never do.

"And yet," she adds quietly after a moment, "I understand how some of this happens. The hardest thing about working in a film environment--and all Los Angeles is a film environment--is that you're immersed in a fantasy world all the time. It's goddamn safe. Everything's done for you. Your life outside your work stops for that period of time. Then, the shoot is over. Suddenly, you have to wash your own knickers on the weekend. I always love to get back to that reality. Others don't."

But isn't escape from reality part of the fun of being a movie star? "I care nothing about being a movie star," Winslet insists. "In many ways I feel I'm being arrogant and cynical when I say this. I'm baffled to be in the position I'm in. When I first thought about being an actress--which, I think, was when I was born--I didn't plan or hope for this. I love acting and I just thought, 'Well, I'll just take each day as it comes and hope to always love it.' In the last couple of years, with things being very busy in my life in terms of work, there have been days when I've asked, 'Why on earth am I doing this job? It's too much mental torture. I'm too tired. I never see my family.' There are times where I thought, 'Shit, I'm not having a life--I'm not having enough life experience upon which to draw.' It's horrible to feel that about the life you're making for yourself."

Hear Winslet talk about her experience as an actress, though, and you know that she is living the life she's meant to live. She speaks respectfully of most of her directors, rapturously about some. For Peter Jackson, with whom she made Heavenly Creatures, she has passionately fond words. "With Peter, who is like my godfather, I knew from the first, 'Here is a man who's going to be with us actors, no matter what.' Once, it was two a.m. and I just couldn't get my head around the scene, the movie was so frightening. Peter took me into a little room, hugged me, and spoke to me as if I were my character, and said, 'You've got to think about this thing you must do tomorrow' and he made me talk it through, plan the killing. By the end of it, I was just a wreck. Then he took me onto the set and said quietly, 'Roll camera.' Because I was just so ready to do it. We had to loop the whole thing later, because the crew people were only slowly coming back onto the set."

Kenneth Branagh turned Winslet down for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but she didn't have to audition or even read to get Hamlet. While shooting, she told her director/costar, "Be as violent with me as you bloody well like. Twist my arms off if you want to." What with his manhandling of her, plus the self-inflicted injuries Ophelia endures in her madness scenes, Winslet wound up with bruises and lumps. But that wasn't the scary point. "I was terrified of doing Shakespeare," she admits. "But Ken told me, 'Do you know how frightened you are right now? Julie Christie is a million times more terrified.' That's when I realized that all of us, Julie Christie, Derek Jacobi, even Ken--we were all in that same little boat together. It helped me calm down."

And how, at the end of the day, does she come out on the subject of her Titanic director, James Cameron, who is not known for putting himself out to calm his cast down? In fact, Winslet, who nearly drowned filming the finale of Titanic, became vocal to the press a while back about her frustrations with the "ordeal" of making the film, saying that the "temper" of the director "frightened" her, and admitting, "Some days I'd wake up and think, 'Please, God, let me die!'"

Time, good reviews, good box office, and, one guesses, consultations with her publicist, have tempered the views she'll now give for public consumption. "He's a genius and a maniac," Winslet says. "A genius in terms of his vision, a maniac in terms of getting what he wants. But that's to be absolutely admired, because to be the controller of a thing that's so absolutely huge is amazing. Some of the visions he had in his head I found really frustrating, because I couldn't quite understand what he meant. I finally came to realize, though, My God, this man has been visualizing nothing but this for the last two years."

Although there's no denying what an ordeal it was to make the movie, Winslet calls the finished product "a brilliant, beautiful film that, when I saw it up there on-screen in all its glory, it was just such a relief and a joy, it blew me away. It's so larger than life, I can't believe it's me up there. It's like, I come from a small town outside of London, what am I doing in this film?"

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