Long before young Kate Winslet made such a searing impression as the willful, passionate heroine who twice careens herself from stem to stern of Titanic, first intending to hurl herself into the sea, then later trying to save herself from it, she was so equated with intensity that her close friends used her surname as an adjective for high emotion. Word has it that whenever she reaches a fever pitch or displays a fit of zeal, her pals quip, "Very Winslet of you." Or, on a day of blustery English weather, one of them is likely to say, "We're having a Winslet sort of day, aren't we?" Winslet's Titanic director, James Cameron, marveled that she sometimes cried for a solid hour after a big emotional scene, and Ang Lee, who earlier directed her Oscar-nominated performance in Sense and Sensibility, apparently found her such a whirlwind that he prescribed tai chi and Austen-era poetry to calm her. She's that volcanic, that undefended against her own deepest feelings.

My first glimpse of her comes one early morning when she strides into the living room of her Peninsula Hotel suite, forthrightly thrusting out her hand and heartily welcoming me in great, mile-a-minute bursts of chat that suggest Emma Thompson on uppers.

"I'm a hardened Brit- I cannot do without my nicotine and coffee," she growls, plunking herself down on the sofa and adroitly rolling a cigarette to accompany her fresh orange juice and croissants. She is preternaturally poised, shit-kicker boots and disarranged hair notwithstanding. And she has an old-soul wisdom in her eyes that also belies her years. These are qualities that make her "Winslet" emotionalism a far more interesting phenomenon than mere temperament.

"So, are you really given to the intensity in your real life that you bring to the screen?" I ask.

"I am incredibly passionate about my life," she proudly asserts. "I am absolutely unable to hide any emotion. If I wrote a book, I'd have to call it P is for Passion. I don't go in for anything halfway. My feelings about things are instant, on the spot. And my heart is always, always on my sleeve."

"Are you going to let loose with any of that intensity while you're here in Hollywood? Go out on the town clubbing later? Or to a party, perhaps with some young American actor?" Winslet flashes me a wry, incredulous look, laughs, and shakes her head in a resolute no.

"What I am doing is getting on a plane for home right after the photo shoot, because I will not stay here for any longer than I need to." She tosses in a stage shudder to underscore that she's not kidding. "Just coming here to Los Angeles- well, let's say, I find it suffocating. I mean, when I flew here to take my mom and dad to the Oscars, I thought I was going to go crazy. I really dislike the glamour side of the business that's so prevalent here, the 'constant attention' thing."

She has no interest in the joys of Young Hollywood? "I've never gotten enough inside 'Young Hollywood' to become a part of the club, as it were," she says. "Leonardo gets cross with me whenever I come here. He says, 'Hey, sweetie, I'm going to get a whole bunch of friends together and hang out, OK?' And I go 'Ugh.' Half the time, I'm tired from the plane trip, He's furious with me right now. But the possibility of going to places like Skybar frightens me because it is so the 'Young Hollywood' thing to do. It doesn't really interest me, and honestly, it's difficult for me to adapt to situations like that. And the whole drug thing frightens me, too. It's such a very big thing, something I'm becoming increasingly more aware of, both here and at home. Somebody said, 'Let's go have a bit of Charley,' and I had no idea what they meant. I've never taken drugs in my life, never even had a drag on a joint. That makes me sound squeaky clean, but as you see, I make up for it in cigarette smoking and coffee drinking and occasionally going out and getting completely plastered, losing my mind, and waking up the next morning feeling very sorry for myself."

Winslet takes a drag of her cigarette and continues, "I'm an incredible control freak. I think what frightens me about drugs is that I can't bear the idea of losing control of my self, my center. Particularly in a business that is so out of control." At the mere mention of the Business, Winslet tears into a merry riff, replete with dramatic gestures and impersonations, on Hollywood's out-of-control incongruities, foibles and absurdities. "Anytime I get off the plane here, I dash into Starbucks - which I love so much that I think I'm going to have to open an franchise back home where we don't have them - and as soon as you hit a Starbucks in Los Angeles, you see all these incredibly thin women, toned, no body fat, who stand at the counter and go, 'Can I get a decaf, no milk, and a low-fat scone?'" Her version of the anorexic, check-out-my-implants wannabes she's imitating is dead-on. Switching back to her plummy tones, she laughs, "And I trot up to the counter, go, very loudly, 'Can I have a latté please, extra hot, and one of them maple nut oat scone things? Actually, I'll bet two of them!'"

Winslet declares herself incensed by the attention young Hollywood women pay to weight and bust size. "At 19, I went from pillar to post about my body and spent at least 95 percent of my head-space every day thinking about what I bloody looked like," she says. "When I was making Sense and Sensibility, Emma Thompson noticed that I'd skip lunch and not eat properly. She said,'If you dare try and lose weight for this job, I will be furious with you.' She went out and bought me The Beauty Myth, and since then I've been much more relaxed about that size of it. But, my God, the young women in Los Angeles!"

Winslet drags hard on her cigarette and exhales skyward. "Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures suited to a fantasy world. Acting is about being real, being honest. Ultimately, the audience doesn't love you or want to be with you because of what you face looks like or because of the size of you backside. They've got to love you because of the honesty within your soul. As an actor, for me to conform physically in such a way would just be taking me to a plane of complete unreality, which is not what it's about. I would be doing everything that I always said I would never do. And yet," she adds quietly after a moment, "I understand how some of this happens. The hardest thing about working in a film environment - and all Los Angeles is a film environment - is that you're immersed in a fantasy world all the time. It's goddamn safe. Everything's done for you. Your life outside your work stops for that period of time. Then, the shoot is over. Suddenly, you have to wash your own knickers on the weekend. I always love to get back to that reality. Other's don't." But isn't escape from reality part of the fun of being a movie star? "I care nothing about being a movie star," Winslet insists. "In many ways I feel I'm being arrogant and cynical when I say this. I'm baffled to be in the position I'm in. When I first thought about being an actress - which, I think, was when I was born- I didn't plan or hope for this. I love acting and I just thought, 'Well, I'll just take each day as it comes and hope to always love it.' In the last couple of years, with things being very busy in my life in terms of work, there have been days when I've asked, 'Why on earth am I doing this job? It's too much mental torture, I'm too tired. I never see my family.' There are times where I thought, 'Shit, I'm not having a life- I'm not having enough life experience upon which to draw.' It's horrible to feel that about the life you're making for yourself."

Hear Winslet talk about her experience as an actress, though, and you know that she is living the life she's meant to live. She speaks respectfully of most of her directors, rapturously about some. For Peter Jackson, with whom she made Heavenly Creatures, she has passionately fond words. "With Peter, who is like my godfather, I knew from the first, 'Here is a man who's going to be with us actors, no matter what.' Once, it was two a.m., and I just couldn't get my head around the scene, the movie was so frightening. Peter took me into a little room, hugged me, and spoke to me as if I were my character, and said, 'You've got to think about this thing you must do tomorrow' and he made me talk it through, plan the killing. By the end of it, I was just a wreck. Then he took me onto the set and said quietly, 'Roll camera.' Because I was just so ready to do it. We had to loop the whole thing later, because the crew people were only slowly coming back onto the set."

Kenneth Branagh turned Winslet down for Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, but she didn't have to audition or even read to get Hamlet. While shooting, she told her director/costar, "Be as violent with me as you bloody well like. Twist my arms off if you want to." What with his manhandling of her, plus the self-inflicted injuries Ophelia endures in her madness scenes, Winslet wound up with bruises and lumps. But that wasn't the scary part. "I was terrified of doing Shakespeare," she admits. "But Ken told me, 'Do you know how frightened you are right now? Julie Cristie is a million times more terrified.' That's when I realized that all of us, Julie Christie, Derek Jacobi, even Ken - we were all in the same little boat together. It helped me calm down."

And how, at the end of the day, does she come out on the subject of her Titanic director, James Cameron, who is not known for putting himself out to calm his cast down? In fact, Winslet, who nearly drowned filming the finale of Titanic, became vocal to the press a while back about her frustrations with the "ordeal" of making the film, saying that the "temper" of the director "frightened" her, and admitting "Some days I'd wake up and think, 'Please, God, let me die!'" Time, good reviews, good box office, and, one guesses, consultations with her publicists have tempered the views she'll now give for public consumption. "He's a genius and a maniac," Winslet says. "A genius in terms of his vision, a maniac in terms of getting what he wants. But that's to be absolutely admired, because to be the controller of a thing that's so absolutely huge is amazing. Some of the visions he had in his head I found really frustrating, because I couldn't quite understand what he meant. I finally came to realize, though, My God, this man has been visualizing nothing but this for the last two years."

Although there's no denying what an ordeal it was to make the movie, Winslet calls the finished product "a brilliant, beautiful film that, when I saw it up there on-screen in all its glory, it was just such a relief and a joy, it blew me away. It's so larger than life, I can't believe it's me up there. It's like, I come from a small town outside London, what am I doing in this film?"

Enough about directors, how does Winslet feel about her costars, like, say, Leonardo DiCaprio? Roses come to Winslet's cheeks and her voice goes all mushy. "I bore people with how wonderful I think Leo is," she says. "He's brilliant. At first, I thought, 'Oh, is he going to be Hollywood stud-like?' But he's a really kind, wonderful person. He said to me one day early in the making of the movie, 'You know, I was kind of worried about you.' He thought I was going to be a proper, tight-corseted, clean, glowy individual with peaches-and cream perfect skin, which I am certainly not. It didn't take long for Leo to crack and see who I really am, and we became very close. But I must say, he is absolutely gorgeous."

Just as she seems to have said her peace on DiCaprio, she suddenly reminisces, "He'd walk onto the set in the morning, after, like a half hour's sleep or something, and that face - it took your breath away. I just looked at him, having been through hair and makeup for hours, and wailed, 'You fucker!' He just practically rolled out of bed and looked that gorgeous. He can't take compliments, absolutely hates them, and he goes, 'Shut up!' and gets me in a headlock and wrestles me to the ground. I love him dearly. I bullied him into doing this movie, because it takes a long time for him to make decisions. He likes to be advised by all of his close friends and family, which was terribly frustrating for me because, with me, it's always gut feeling. We became such good friends, so close, absolutely like brother and sister. We've talked about everything. We've laid our souls out on a slab to each other, in one way or another."

With eight months in each other's company in remote locations, did she and her new soul mate lay anything else to each other? "Oh, my God, you're kidding - the whole notion!" she chides with a touch of mock Mary Poppins. But why not? They're both young, great looking, gifted and available, right? After a bit of good-natured coaxing, she admits, "Before we met, I thought, 'I'm just going to completely fall in love with this guy.' Once I met him, I thought, 'Well, it's true, Leonardo DiCaprio is incredibly beautiful, but no way.' He's just so normal and so - what's the word I'm looking for?- fundamental. Very chatty and so funny that we laughed and joked around. Everybody kept saying, 'God, you two just get on so well.' Leo and I sometimes still talk about it and say, 'Oh, should we have an affair just for the hell of it?' But we wind up agreeing, 'No, we couldn't, because we'd laugh too much.' We just wouldn't be able to take it seriously." They did take the work seriously, though. DiCaprio's working style was new to Winslet. "He'd just say, 'Hey, let's not talk about it, let's just do it.' That was rather daunting, because I'd think, 'Oh shit, what's he going to do?' After we did a take that was absolutely fine of the scene late in the movie where we run through the ship toward each other and end up in this big hug, saying, 'I couldn't leave you, I couldn't go without you,' Leo said to Jim, 'Hey, can we just have one for the actors?' Jim said yes, I had no idea what Leo was going to do. It was a so weird how he just got hold of me and lifted me up in a violently emotional way. I could do nothing except give it back. That's the take that made it into the movie."

And the two stars of Titanic coexisted happily with all those long grueling months? "There were days when I would say, 'God, I can't be without Leo,'" Winslet recalls. "He was my rock. We were such a team, nothing could break us, nothing could come near us. Jim kept saying, 'I am so lucky and grateful because just as easily, you two could have hated each other.' And it helped Jim, too, because there were days on end where he'd be on a crane hundreds of feet up doing a panoramic shot and we wouldn't even see him, he'd just be a voice over a loudspeaker. That was often frustrating, especially if you had a quick question. But I'd ask Leo and he'd always come up with the answer. God, he's wonderful. I love him to death."

As she goes on to reminisce about some pranks DiCaprio played on her, Winslet at one point lets out an uproarious, foot-stomping whoop. Which is when I notice her feet. Which are mighty. I ask her teasingly whether she ever regrets that her feet weren't bound at birth, and she chortles, "No, I'm glad I've got big, huge flappers. Leo used to laugh at my feet all the time, going, 'Fuck, man! Look at those things!' The other day we were having our makeup done for a photo shoot, and he said, 'Shit, I haven't seen those things for awhile.' We used to swap shoes all the time because we have the same size feet.

"You know," says Winslet, warming to the subject, "I've got big, huge toes, too. Really, I have to show you because they're extraordinary. Absolutely massive." Down come her laces, off come her shoes and socks and yep, there they are. Damn, they are extraordinary. "See, these are the kinds of things Leo and I laughed about, too," she says. "So we could never take a relationship seriously."

Winslet not only has happy memories of a delightful working relationship with her costar, she has the happy results of the work, too. "The first thing Leo and I knew was that we were going to have to fight to hold onto this very profound love that the two people, our characters, share. We had to fight because sometimes the scenes were just so huge, with so much action going on, so many stunts. We knew that the thing that would break people's hearts was not the fact that so many people died on the ship that night, but the love story. And when I saw it at a screening, that last 20 minutes, I sat among men in business suits who were sobbing their hearts out like small children."

With Titanic as her calling card, Winslet is flooded with offers at the moment. "Once your foot's in that door, you don't need to agonize so much over the struggle to find work," she admits. "But, with some of my friends, my family, it's heartbreaking because they're still trying to get that foot in the door. I have the luxury of being able to choose what I think is the right thing for me. It's like that fantastic speech Frances McDormand made at the Oscars, 'We women have the choice.' Being in that position, the ability to choose things, thrills and amazes me."

It wasn't always so, of course. Wasn't she up for William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet? "I tested for it three years ago, when Leonardo was definitely already doing it, but I knew, reading it, that I was too old for the role- too old inside." The Crucible? "I was desperate to do it, phoning all the time, asking, 'What's going on?' I was obsessively jealous that it was always going to be Winona as Abigal, but she did it wonderfully, even if that was my dream role. On Oscar night for Sense and Sensibility, this huge bouquet of roses arrived with a note saying, 'Good luck tonight. I think you're wonderful. Much love, Winona Ryder.' It was so sweet and lovely, I was like, 'My God, Winona Ryder sent me flowers!'" Woody Allen's movie, which Ryder took when Drew Barrymore dropped out? "It was a tremendous honor to meet him, but it was a minute-and-a-half or something, and he smiled, asked me a few questions, took my Polaroid, and that was that. Leonardo's having such a great time with him, but I knew that, with Judy Davis and Ken Branagh already in it, he wouldn't cast another Brit as an American." She philosophizes, "I've never sat in a movie theater going, 'Shit! Why didn't I do this movie?' Regret isn't good. Every decision one makes in life is made for a reason or another. Whenever something bad happens, I go, This is happening for a reason, or This is going to teach me something."

Winslet scrunches back on the couch and says, sighing, "Every time I go to work now, I go through this suicidal saga of, 'I'm terrible,' 'I'm fat,' 'I'm ugly,' 'I can't do this anymore.' I get so paranoid. It's so incredibly encouraging when people say they like me and my work, but it almost frightens me because I think, 'Oh, shit! I have to live up to it, not disappoint them.' I don't necessarily think of myself as particularly good or attractive, and I'm very aware of how you can burn out in this business. It's like 'too much, too young.' And there's so much worrying among some actors about how something is going to do at the box office. Greed is a nasty thing. I'm sure it's very easy for actors to become greedy once they're handed everything on a plate and can pick and choose from any entree', appetizer or dessert they want. Hugh Grant once said to me, 'How well did Heavenly Creatures do at the box office?'" (Here Winslet imitates Grant so perfectly, you can practically see his hair spilling over his forehead.) "When I said, 'I have no idea,' he was shocked, saying, 'Well, don't you read the figures?' No, I don't. To get all caught up in the business side of it frustrates me. That's one major reason why I really don't want to play only big leads in films or only strong female figures. I'm more happy to play a part in a smaller production if I really love the script, the material." Which is exactly what she'd doing at the moment. Winslet's next film will be the small-scaled Hideous Kinky, based on the novel by the real-life granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, in which she plays a hippie mom who ran away to spend years in Morocco with her kids in the early 70s. "Neither my agent here or in London got the script at all or why I wanted to do it," she says about Hideous Kinky. "The mother I play is very carefree and not necessarily as domestic as a normal parent would be. My agent said, 'Don't you think people are going to say, 'Why is she playing this woman who's basically not a very good mother?'' When agents don't like what I like, I have to say, 'You have to listen to me and this is what I want to do. I'd really appreciate it if you would work on this and help me. This is falling at a really important time in my life- a time I feel I should go and do it.' I'm an actor. I have to do just that. The other, business side of that- doing publicity, choosing things that may get a big audience- is a totally different thing."

I tell Winslet she strikes me as a terrific combination of good sense and age-appropriate inner chaos, to which she responds, "Personally, morally and emotionally, I sometimes feel I'm in complete turmoil. I really don't know who I am. I still feel like I've got a hell of a lot to learn, you know? But I would hope not to know who I am at 22, right?" Right she is, and whatever she learns, she'll be fascinating to watch all along. Very Winslet of her, I think.

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