Kate in The Raw

By Belinda Luscombe

Two things distinguish the career of Kate Winslet. First, she had four Oscar nominations before she turned 30, a feat no other actor has managed since Liz Taylor more than four decades ago. Second, she has got naked in more movies than any nonporn star of her generation. From Titanic, the movie that propelled her into the American mainstream, in which she posed for Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack, to Little Children, her Oscar play for this year, in which she and Patrick Wilson's character have a tumble--the first of many--on the tumble dryer, she has shown her willingness to bare all. (For those counting at home, Winslet also went the full monty in Jude, Hideous Kinky, Holy Smoke, Quills and Iris.) Even in Flushed Away, the new animated film in which she's the voice of a rodent, Rita, her character loses her trousers.

If there's a suggestion of paradox in those two achievements--a mixture of classiness and looseness, of discipline and danger, of dedication and recklessness--Winslet doesn't cop to it. They seem to her as natural partners as her frank language and posh accent. The secret to nude scenes, which she says she hates, is establishing "a relationship with the director where you can say, 'Look, I'd really rather they didn't see my [British slang for private part],' or 'I've got a nasty mosquito bite on my left bum cheek. Can we not shoot that low please?'"

This fall a lot of Winslet, 31, is on show in a lot of places. Having weathered--that is, not been blamed for--All the King's Men, and done a serious turn with Little Children, Todd Field's tale of suburban suffocation, she's dipping her foot into her first big commercial movie since Titanic, Nancy Meyers' romantic comedy The Holiday. Winslet plays Iris, a retiring English wallflower who swaps houses for Christmas with Cameron Diaz's overachieving Hollywood type. This is the first film in which Winslet has ever played who she actually is, a modern young British woman. But Iris is Winslet too. "You, I can tell, are a leading lady," the completely irresistible 90-year-old Eli Wallach chides her. "But for some reason, you're behaving like the best friend."

The reason, the real Winslet might have responded, is because that's what people like about her. She has all the allure of the leading lady but also the I'll-pitch-in enthusiasm of the wingwoman. "Kate's clearly somebody you'd just absolutely love to have a long lunch with," says Meyers. "A girl's girl. Beautiful but not intimidating to other women." It's not a coincidence that Jackie Earle Haley, a child star best remembered for 1979's Breaking Away, suddenly turned up--after years of obscurity--in two Winslet movies. Having worked with him on King's Men, she heard he was up for a part in Little Children, recommended him, read with him at his audition and wept with him after he got the role. When The Holiday's Meyers wished she could make an interior into an exterior shot but the set wasn't dressed, Winslet offered to help ready it. "She was ready to get the hammer and nails, I swear to God," says Meyers. "We didn't have time, but the fact that she was so willing to do that, well, take it from me, it's unusual."

Even the nude scenes--which require leading-lady confidence--are done in a quest for vulnerability rather than Bond-girl-dom. "Not to put down other women in movies or movies in general," says Winslet, "but I do have an issue with this kind of image of perfection that a movie can put across. You want to say to people 'Stop! Stop! It's not real. We've been in makeup for 212 hours. We don't really look like that.' I mean, I'm living proof that we don't really look like that." That last statement, while it looks sweet on paper, and was said earnestly, would actually offer scant comfort to any woman. In the flesh, Winslet's just your regular-looking movie star. (Except for her feet, which are huge--size 11--and about which she is obsessed.) "I've had two kids, and every woman out there knows that when you've had a child your body just doesn't go back to normal," she says. "I have lots of stretch marks and all the rest of it, and I'm sort of proud of all my battle wounds."

Winslet has to work to keep her life in best-friend mode. She allows no glossy magazines in her home, although she's partial to the odd cooking periodical from Britain, and she tries to tell her kids that autograph seekers are people who want directions. (Her oldest, Mia, has stopped believing her, and nearly 3-year-old Joe can't be far behind.) She seems intent on establishing a sisterhood with her audience, particularly women. She won't go to physical extremes in prepping for a role and has not courted Oscar as many actresses have--by transforming herself into someone uglier or fitter or of a different gender.

She doesn't need to. She can do it all with her face. Her full cream complexion and even fuller lips make her a natural for two things: period movies and close-ups. Winslet is capable of setting up a scene--her character, the relationship with the person she's talking to and probably even a key plot point--without saying a word. "Every director, if you look at her movies, uses her a lot in close-ups," says Meyers. "You see everything on her face."

Many of those who know her say the role that comes closest to her in real life is the little performance she gave on Ricky Gervais' TV show Extras. She played herself playing the role of a nun harboring a group of Jews during World War II. The Kate she plays talks dirty (which is accurate) and admits to taking the part because it almost guarantees an Oscar (which is a caricature).

It's a gutsy thing to do--to make fun of your own image--because it could misfire horribly or, worse, confirm everyone's suspicions about you. But of all the traits needed for stardom, the one Winslet really radiates is confidence. With few exceptions (there was a short-lived marriage, before her current one to director Sam Mendes), she knows what she wants and how to get it. And as she put it, "I don't do anything by halves." Her coffee is taken very hot and strong, her unfiltered cigarettes rolled by herself--although, she says, she only smokes during interviews--and if she wants a chocolate bickie (that's a cookie to Americans) or three before lunch, she's having them. "She has the will of [Field Marshal Erwin] Rommel," says Field, the director of Children. "But it's for a purpose, not self-interest." Oscar nominations, after all, don't simply drop out of the sky. Winslet knows how to work the awards crowd, taking her fast, frank and low-falutin' self to the requisite meet and greets, especially those with the actor groups, who make up the largest part of the Academy voting pool.

It's that confidence that enables her to be both the thoroughbred who works like a dray and the Oscar perennial who shows off her breasts. It's the same instinct that told her what to do when Titanic became a global cultural obsession, transforming her from the daughter of actors making her way up the film food chain to an international symbol of young, reckless, undying love. She fled. She made a string of the least commercially appealing films imaginable, featuring wayward mothers, weird cults, memory loss and the Marquis de Sade. In fact, the 13 films she has appeared in since Titanic have not together grossed half of what the iceberg movie made domestically. She's always delighted to meet people who have never seen it. It's not that she's not proud of her biggest movie. She found a very early treatment of the script the other day, and she had written on the cover "I f___ing LOVE this!" It's just that it proved quite difficult to get off that boat.

So now that she's on dry land and has established herself as the go-to actress for difficult, interesting roles, what does she do? She returns to the multiplex with The Holiday, a big treacly romantic comedy, in which she finds love, happiness and gets to keep all her clothes on.

Figures.