Choosy Winslet plots path beyond 'The Reader'

NEW YORK -- In the Hollywood-as-high-school fantasy of our minds, Katherine Heigl and Kate Hudson giggle in the back of RomCom 101; Anne Hathaway rocks an independent study with Julia Roberts; Charlize and Nicole breeze in and out of "Prosthetics and Your Oscar."

And tucked away somewhere is a permission-only course, team-taught by Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Vanessa Redgrave, with occasional guest lectures by Maggie Smith. The class is called "Dame Training: How to Join the Greats." And because Cate Blanchett and a few other pupils are absent today, the only student -- taking furious notes and rapid-firing questions -- is Kate Winslet.

Kate Winslet? Lovely. Lovely in "Sense and Sensibility," lovely even when speaking vulgarities with that British accent. Lovely in her fleshiness, which has nothing to do with the curves everyone's always talking about and everything to do with how real she is, and the fact that when she cries on screen she looks genuinely awful. She commits.

She has no Academy Awards, though she's been up for five. At 22 (Remember "Titanic"?) she was the youngest person ever to have been nominated twice, then at 26 ("Iris") the youngest for three, then at 29 ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") the youngest for four, then at 31 ("Little Children") ...

Next are two more Oscar-bait roles, "The Reader" and "Revolutionary Road."

She may not see it ("HA HA HA HA HA," she explodes when the dame thing is suggested), but after a decade of being the Not-It girl, eschewing "hot" for "interesting," one gets the sense that she's going to be one icon of a woman.

No sympathy

"I didn't try to make her sympathetic. I knew that would be a mistake -- I knew it would be wrong to demand the sympathy of an audience. I'm playing a woman who is an SS guard. We're not supposed to sympathize with SS guards. ... But I knew that I had to understand her. I had to really understand her, to come to her in very profound and complicated ways and develop my own relationship with her."

In a Park Avenue hotel suite, Winslet, 33, has been holed up all day for interviews. Her feet are bare, the rest of her is va-va-voom in a sleeveless black dress. Hair: blonde and Vargas Girl-y. Skin: creamy enough to be spread on something. Topic: "The Reader."

It's set in the decades after the war, exploring the ramifications of an affair between a German teen and the older woman he discovers was a guard at Auschwitz. Winslet's Hanna Schmitz is at once stony and fragile, a monster but, perhaps, due to a secret revealed midway through the film, also a victim. The sex scenes -- with barely legal David Kross -- are plentiful and naked. The film prompts ambivalence.

"I was very aware that if an audience member felt any degree of sympathy for Hanna Schmitz, at the same time they would feel compromised for feeling that way," Winslet says, which is exactly why she thought the role was so delicious. "What you're given at face value is extremely limited, but you knooooow beneath the surface there's so much stuff for you to rummage through."

"Revolutionary Road," directed by her husband, Sam Mendes, is about marital carnage. A 1950s couple rages against the suburban machine because they'd expected their lives to be more interesting than barbecues and community theater. It reunites Winslet with Leonardo DiCaprio, whom Winslet's 8- and 5-year-old call "Uncle Leo," and it so thoroughly disabuses any notions of young love that it makes one wonder if Jack slipping into the ocean at the end of "Titanic" wasn't the best thing for the couple after all. Winslet's April Wheeler is miserable, passionate, desperate and resigned.