Kate Winslet: Kiss Us, Kate

Enough about directors, how does Winslet feel about her costars, like, say, Leonardo DiCaprio? Roses come to Winslet's cheeks and her voice goes all mushy. "I bore people with how wonderful I think Leo is," she says. "He's brilliant. At first, I thought, 'Oh, is he going to be Hollywood stud-like?' But he's a really kind, wonderful person. He said to me one day early in the making of the movie, 'You know, I was kind of worried about you.' He thought I was going to be a proper, tight-corseted, clean, glowy individual with peaches-and-cream perfect skin, which I am certainly not. It didn't take long for Leo to crack and see who I really am, and we became very close. But, I must say, he is absolutely gorgeous."

Just as she seems to have said her piece on DiCaprio, she suddenly reminisces, "He'd walk onto the set in the morning, after, like, a half hour's sleep or something, and that face--it took your breath away. I just looked at him, having been through hair and makeup for hours, and wailed, 'You fucker!' He just practically rolled out of bed and looked that gorgeous. He can't take compliments, absolutely hates them, and he goes, 'Shut up!' and gets me in a headlock and wrestles me to the ground. I love him dearly. I bullied him into doing the movie, because it takes a long time for him to make decisions. He likes to be advised by all his close friends and family, which was terribly frustrating for me because, with me, it's always gut feeling. We became such good friends, so close, absolutely like brother and sister. We've talked about everything. We've laid our souls out on a slab to each other, in one way or another."

With eight months in each other's company in remote locations, did she and her new soul mate lay out anything else to each other? "Oh, my God, you're kidding--the whole notion!" she chides with a touch of mock Mary Poppins. But why not? They're both young, great looking, gifted and available, right? After a bit of good-natured coaxing, she admits, "Before we met, I thought, 'I'm just going to fall completely in love with this guy.' Once I met him, I thought, 'Well, it's true. Leonardo DiCaprio is incredibly beautiful, but no way.' He's just so normal and so--what's the word I'm looking for?--fundamental. Very chatty and so funny that we laughed and joked around. Everybody kept saying, 'God, you two just get on so well.' Leo and I sometimes still talk about it and say, 'Oh, should we have an affair just for the hell of it?' But we wind up agreeing, 'No, we couldn't, because we'd laugh too much.' We just wouldn't be able to take it seriously."

They did take the work seriously, though. DiCaprio's working style was new to Winslet. "He'd just say, 'Hey, let's not talk about it, let's just do it.' That was rather daunting, because I'd think, 'Oh shit, what's he going to do?' After we did a take that was absolutely fine of the scene late in the movie where we run through the ship toward each other and end up in this big hug, saying, 'I couldn't leave you, I couldn't go without you,' Leo said to Jim, 'Hey, can we just have one for the actors?' Jim said yes. I had no idea what Leo was going to do. It was so weird how he just got hold of me and lifted me up in a violently emotional way. I could do nothing except give it back. That's the take that made it into the movie."

And the two stars of Titanic coexisted happily all those long grueling months? "There were days when I would say, 'God, I can't be without Leo,'" Winslet recalls. "He was my rock. We were such a team, nothing could break us, nothing could come near us. Jim kept saying, 'I am so lucky and grateful because just as easily, you two could have hated each other.' And it helped Jim, too, because there were days on end where he'd be on a crane hundreds of feet up doing a panoramic shot and we wouldn't even see him, he'd just be a voice over a loudspeaker. That was often frustrating, especially if you had a quick question. But I'd ask Leo and he'd always come up with the answer. God, he's wonderful. I love him to death."

As she goes on to reminisce about some pranks DiCaprio played on her, Winslet at one point lets out an uproarious, foot-stomping whoop. Which is when I notice her feet. Which are mighty. I ask her teasingly whether she ever regrets that her feet weren't bound at birth, and she chortles, "No, I'm glad I've got big, huge flappers. Leo used to laugh at my feet all the time, going, 'Fuck, man! Look at those things!' The other day we were having our makeup done for a photo shoot, and he said, 'Shit, I haven't seen those things for awhile.' We used to swap shoes all the time because we have the same size feet.

"You know," says Winslet, warming to the subject, "I've got big, huge toes, too. Really, I have to show you because they're extraordinary. Absolutely massive." Down come her laces, off come her shoes and socks and, yep, there they are. Damn, they are extraordinary. "See, these are the kinds of things Leo and I laughed about, too," she says. "So we could never take a relationship seriously."

Winslet not only has her happy memories of a delightful working relationship with her costar, she has the happy results of the work, too. "The thing that Leo and I knew was that we were going to have to fight to hold onto this very profound love that the two people, our characters, share. We had to fight for that because sometimes the scenes were just so huge, with so much action going on, so many stunts. We knew that the thing that would break people's hearts was not the fact that so many people died on the ship that night, but the love story. And when I saw it at a screening, that last 20 minutes, I sat among men in business suits who were sobbing their hearts out like small children."

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