`I was on the tube just before Christmas. and this girl turned round to me and said, `Are you Kate Winslet? And I said, `Well, yes. I am actually'. And she said, `And you're getting the tube?' And I said, `Yes'. And she said, `Don't you have a big car that drives you around?' And I said, `No'. And she was absolutely stunned that I wasn't being driven round in some flash car all the time. It was ludicrous."
Kate Winslet performs both parts: the incredulous straphanger and the defensive one-of-the-people celebrity. Face and body-language change as the familiar head turns, swivelling in her chair, letting the dialogue tell the story, as she does with every anecdote she relates.
While others might parade their ordinariness as some kind of PR tool, Winslet is simply telling the truth. She is the girl next door, albeit one who got very lucky. The job she loves has brought her both critical and financial success, making her, at 24, one of the richest women in Britain, which means she can do what she wants. No tacky telly. No just-for-money-Hollywood. Just interesting movies. Risks. Kate Winslet is big on risks. She has just finished shooting Quills - out later this year - about the last days of the Marquis de Sade, a bursting-out-of-corset affair that would give Jane Austen an attack of the vapours.
After hitting the button in Titanic, Winslet could have done anything. She chose to do the low-budget Hideous Kinky, an autobiographical first novel by Bella Freud, set in Morocco, which she invested in and co-produced.
This was followed by another risky venture, Holy Smoke, written and directed by the New Zealand director of The Piano, Jane Campion, though here the risks are of quite a different order.
We're sitting in a smart London hotel room, all magnolia blossoms and sardine-packed tulips, very different from the corner of the Soho office where I interviewed Winslet shortly after her emotional intensity and fresh-faced beauty had netted her an Oscar nomination for Sense and Sensibility. So how has she changed in the last four years?
The all-black biker gear has given way to short, tight lizard-print skirt topped by black denim jacket with red stitching. In short, the street uniform of her contemporaries, both then and now. This time her face is veiled in a gossamer shimmer of make-up. Not that she needs it: Kate Winslet has the skin of a new-picked peach and a mouth so perfectly shaped, flawlessly full and symmetrical that it's hard not to stare. Four years ago she was a gangling girl. Now she is a woman of startling luminous beauty, not unconnected, she insists, with her three-months-in pregnancy. Her sickness is pretty much over and now it's glow, glow, glow all the way.
Although hardly an obvious career move, Hideous Kinky proved pivotal because it was on location in Morocco that she met Jim Threapleton, then assistant director, now adored husband and father of baby-to-be. (No bump visible - "First scan next week and I'm just desperate for it.")
Yet it is in Holy Smoke that you find echoes of the journey Winslet herself has made from gangling girl to blooming young woman.
Ruth, a surface-tough 20-year-old Australian falls under the spell of an Indian guru while on the back-packing trail. Her horrified parents employ the services of an American "cult-buster" to bring her back to earth. Played with toe-curling macho-verve by veteran Harvey Keitel, their subsequent coupling proves life-shattering to both.
Winslet's performance is about as brave as any I can remember. In addition to no-imagination-required sex, the script has her stand naked in the desert and pee, a scene not intended to be erotic (nor is it) but representing a psychological crisis. Had she realised what would be demanded of her?
"I knew it was really radical before doing it. The script was so bizarre. I would read it and read it and I would get to the end and I'd think, `now hang on a minute, what is it about?' And that's what I really loved about it. Because it did offer so many different things. And yes, I did know that it was out there and confrontational and risky but, you know, acting is about taking risks really. And it's about the ultimate challenge. And Holy Smoke was the ultimate challenge for me."
If the urinating scene was bad enough, kissing Harvey Keitel - old enough to be her grandfather - can't have been much fun either, I suggest. She makes a face. "You just have to get on with it because it's part of the job." Nor was it simply because Keitel is hardly love's young dream. Kissing anyone you don't fancy is difficult, she explains, including her Titanic co-star, the screen's biggest heart throb since Valentino.
"There were times when I really didn't like kissing Leo. I'd think, `ugh - you've got to brush your teeth'. And people say to me all the time `What was it like kissing Leonardo de Caprio?' When I'm asked that question, I get really irritated and say, `Look, I'm married now'. I'm hardly going to say `Oh, it was really great.' Also, it wasn't really great. He was just a bloke."
Holy Smoke, however, called on Winslet to do more than kiss just a bloke. A critical scene involved her kissing a Garbo-esque woman. "Oh my God," she shivers. "Kissing girls, now that is totally weird. That actually, makes me feel totally, arghgguuh." And for a few seconds the lovely Winslet mouth is transformed into a tongue-protruding gargoyle. It was the most difficult thing she has ever had to do on film, she says. "I felt myself pulling back from that, really quite violently pulling back. But it is shocking. I thought it was a great scene and that's why it had to be there, but it doesn't make it any easier on me. I mean, even the urinating scene. God that was so urghgh, urgh, ooorgh." More girlish gargoyling. "I loved that scene. It was so amazing. It was the most important scene in the film, because it was such a turning point. But God. Doing it. There was a version where you saw the whole shebang, which was not very pleasant really. You sort of go, `Hmm. I don't really know about that'."
In April, she has got four weeks shooting on Enigma, a film adapted by Tom Stoppard from Robert Harris's novel about the British code-breaking team at Bletchley Park during the second World War. Then nothing until the baby is six months old, when filming begins on an adaptation of Ther ese Raquin, from the novel by Zola in which she takes the lead. After which it'll be Jim's turn. A normal life for the baby is more important than anything else, she says, and they plan to take it in turns to work.
"I don't want to be one of these mothers who cart their kid around and I'm photographed getting off a plane with the baby in a pack on the front and heaps of bags and sunglasses on. It would just be vile, vile."
SINCE we last met, she believes she has learnt to slow down, to stop "rushing around so much. I know some actors just go back to back but I could never do that. Largely because I know that for me life is much more important than work and also as an actor I believe you must stop so you can live, so you can have real life experiences and stuff to draw from. Because if you don't have that, you're just regurgitating stuff and pretending basically."
It's the reason she never watches rushes these days. A mistake she made while shooting her first film, Heavenly Creatures, shot in New Zealand when she was barely 17. "It was a really bad move because when I was watching it I was going, `Hmmm, I don't know if I like that, so I won't do that again'. And actually I stopped the character taking on its own life, because I was watching myself and I wasn't liking myself up on the screen, and that's not right."
Not liking what she looked like led to severe dieting that, fortunately, she says, never developed into full anorexia, although she did stop having periods for four years. "It was around about the time I was doing Jude. I wasn't so thin people would noticeably go, `Oh my God, that girl should eat something'. But we have a slow metabolism in my family and we can't eat lots and lots because we all put on weight really easily. But to lose weight we have to eat virtually nothing. Which was outrageous. I initially thought I ought to be thinner than I am. What's so cruel about this f***ing eating disorder is that you get so seduced by the weight that you're losing, and you feel your bones sticking out, and you think, `ooh, just a couple more pounds'." Winslet, acting out the scene, wriggles with delight.
"I remember getting on the scales and being 8 stone 7, then getting on and being 8 stone 2 and when I got to 8 stone I decided I would stop. But of course I didn't."
The hurtful press that Winslet has suffered over her career concerning her weight is now just water off a duck's back. "Being married you're allowed to stop questioning who you are. You're allowed to stop analysing yourself, judging yourself. And it's such a relief that Jim and I, we're doing it together and we're going through this life thing together and it's such a huge adventure."
Holy Smoke opened in the Screen, Dublin and the Kino, Cork on March 31st