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KATE WINSLET... Ruth HARVEY KEITEL... P.J. Waters
Her heart goes on: Kate Winslet plays a fiery earth mother in the psychosexual Holy Smoke. By Stephen Schaefer FROM Mr.Showbiz
You can't keep those Titanic lovers apart. At least not if you're the studio chiefs who scheduled Kate Winslet's offbeat comedy Holy Smoke to open in wide release last Friday opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's much more serious drama, The Beach. Like her previous picture, the little-seen Hideous Kinky, Holy Smoke continues the alternative-star route Winslet has chosen since Titanic became a worldwide phenomenon two years ago. Where DiCaprio has become a $20 million A-list leading man, now offered the same big-budget roles as Mel Gibson, Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise, the 24-year-old Winslet is settling into quirky, independent cinema — and seems quite content to do so. For this third-generation English actress, success came so easily and spectacularly at 16 with her first film, Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, that she hardly worries about status or salary, much less the size of her trailer.
Holy Smoke teams Winslet with Australia's Jane Campion, the writer-director best known for the Oscar-winning The Piano. A sex reversal comedy boosted by some gratuitous nudity on Winslet's part (but not, thank heavens, on co-star Harvey Keitel's), Holy Smoke has Winslet playing a woman whose faith in an Indian cult prompts her parents to spirit her back home to Australia for a "cleansing" with Keitel's American deprogrammer.
Winslet arrives a few minutes late for the interview in a basement conference room at Manhattan's Four Seasons Hotel. Clad in a burgundy top and long single-breasted black blazer, an "old favorite from an English designer," she parks her personal publicist at the door, sits down at the massive conference table and rolls a cigarette. In the course of talking about her movie, Winslet reveals that she had given up looking for a life partner when she met her husband Jim Threapleton on the set of Hideous Kinky and felt "liberated" working with Campion. Maybe that accounted for her free-spirited greeting of the millennium: skinny-dipping off the coast of Cornwall with her husband.