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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.