The Unsinkable Kate Winslet

Winslet recalls that she and DiCaprio would sometimes lie on the set smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and staring up at the stars. Other times, she would watch him play Tomb Raider on Nintendo or they would sing to each other the Bette Midler hit “Wind Beneath My Wings,” an indirect, on-site spoof of the Titanic scene in which Jack leads Rose to the prow of the ship and tells her to close her eyes and spread out her arms. When Winslet had an attack of vertigo on the back of the upended poop deck — spending a week in harnesses suspended 100 feet in the air — DiCaprio calmed her down. “I just told her we were safe,” he says. “She believed me.” One night, very late, Winslet and DiCaprio were lying on the deck during a break. An assistant approached for food orders. “Leo was so tired,” Winslet recalls; he had his head on Winslet’s stomach and asked for a sandwich. “The assistant asked, ‘What do you want on it?’ and Leo said, ‘Oh, Kate will tell you.’ And Leo just kind of fell asleep. And I did know exactly what he wanted this kind of cheese and no tomato and no pickle. I absolutely knew. And I thought, ‘God, that’s really weird that I know this person so well.’ It was brilliant.” 

Winslet has always acted, and in person she is welcoming and harried, perpetually backstage. “I’m smoking like a fucking chimney,” she says a few days later as she opens her hotel-room door, “so you certainly can.” Then she wraps up a phone call — “Keep your pecker up! Bye-bye” — and apologizes for what she is wearing: “press clothes,” a heavy black turtleneck and black slacks, “which is sort of annoying.” She insists on walking me to the closet and showing me her beat-up Harley-Davidson biker boots. “Now this is me,” she says. “This is really, really me.” Winslet crosses the living room of her suite and curls into her sofa. The balcony door is open, since Winslet is a woman who enjoys breezes, and the railing overlooks a misty Central Park, like the deck of an ocean liner that has unaccountably docked in midtown Manhattan. Winslet glances mistrustfully at the furniture, which appears expensive and invisible in the manner of well-born children. Winslet doesn’t like hotels. “We never as a family went to an exotic place and stayed in a hotel,” she says. When the Winslets vacationed, it was on budget tickets, pitching tents in a field “or going to stay with some friends. That’s why hotels sometimes seem quite sort of lonely to me.” 

Winslet’s life has been shaped by acting. Like families in which each successive generation goes into plumbing or police work, the Winslets have memorized lines and shown up for auditions. “It wasn’t necessarily that I knew acting was what I wanted to do,” says Winslet. “It’s just that I knew it’s what I would end up doing.” Winslet’s grandparents managed a 60-seat theater in their back yard in Reading, England, where they presented musicals and plays. Sally, Winslet’s mother, trained as a nanny; Winslet’s father, Roger, is an actor. “He’s always had a bit of a tough time of it,” Winslet carefully explains. Kate is the second of four children. Anna, 25, acts; Beth, 20, just performed in her first BBC production; Joss, 17, is thinking about acting. 

Winslet auditioned at the age of eleven for an acting school named Redroofs, which was located in Maidenhead, England, the town where the Spice Girls got their start. Her grandmother put up the first two years’ tuition. Winslet ended up unconvinced by acting schools. “Bladdy-bladdy bullshit,” she says. 

The school did help with what actors need: connections. The school knew people. It had its foot in the door. At twelve, Winslet made her debut in a cereal commercial, as a frenetic Sugar Puffs eater. At fifteen, she was cast in a science-fiction series, and she hooked up with her first boyfriend — Stephen Tredre, an actor who was twelve years her senior. “I told my mum and I thought, ‘Oh, no, she’s going to hit the roof.’ And she said, ‘So what’s he like, then? Are you going to bring him home?'”