PUT ME IN A CORSET, NOT A BOX

Kate Winslet on keeping mystery, losing weight and how the whalebone made her career

English rose: yes. Shrinking violet: no. Kate Winslet, 38, is a ballsy woman. She’ll tell hypocritical British tabloids to get stuffed when they sneer at her for having three children by three husbands. She’ll talk dirty while dressed as a nun for Ricky Gervais’s Extras . She’ll remain brazenly curvaceous in a world of waifs and cause a riot when her lingerie-clad cover photo is retouched by a men’s magazine.

Winslet’s career choices have been no less ballsy. Born into an acting family, she danced and sang in a cereal commercial when she was 11. At 17, she played a murderous lesbian adolescent in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures . A critic wrote that her performance was so good she would always be associated with the part and would never become a big star. How wrong he was.

In 1995, Winslet was cast as Marianne Dashwood in Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination. Suddenly every director of period dramas wanted to squeeze her into whalebones to see her cheeks flush. She appeared in Jude, based on the Thomas Hardy novel, and played Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. People started calling her “Corset Kate”.

After 1997’s blockbuster Titanic she ditched the corset, turning down what became Gwyneth Paltrow’s role in Shakespeare in Love to make the kinky Quills, about the Marquis de Sade. In 2008, she won the Best Actress Oscar for another erotic role: Hannah Schmitz in The Reader.

In Labor Day, she plays a recluse who takes in an escaped prisoner. I get very fed up when people criticise me and say that my children have gone through an ordeal because of my marriages. My kids are always with me. They don’t go from pillar to post. They’re not flown here and there with nannies. My children live with me, that is it.

I’ve got the corset to thank for a lot of good things. Several people who made a huge difference to my career saw me in corsets, like Ken Branagh, who rang me to ask me if I’d like to don corsets again to be Ophelia to his Hamlet. I nearly passed out with excitement.

In our house there was always lots of singing and putting on plays and tap dancing in the kitchen. Coming from an acting

‘I think women should accept their appearance with pride’

family has meant they have been really brilliant about my career. Insecurity and bad luck is what actors work with all the time. I have seen enough of the other side of acting — being out of work and waiting for the phone to ring — to appreciate everything I get. I love researching my roles — seeing how women were in a different circumstance from your own and how you relate to them. Obviously I wasn’t able to sympathise with the SS guard I played in The Reader , but she was very interesting to play. I get very fed up every time I put on or lose weight and everybody says I’ve lied about my exercise regime or something like that. I think women should accept their appearance with pride. The more people know too much about who you really are, the more the mystery is taken away from the artist. And the harder it is for people to believe that person in a particular role. — © Marianne Gray