Twice-married actress Kate Winslet wouldn't dream of having her previous relationships erased from her mind like crazy-haired character Clementine Kruczynski. Steve Pratt reports.

UNLIKE the woman she plays in her latest movie, Kate Winslet wouldn't rub out memories of a past relationship. "I can relate to it in the sense that some people would wish to do that, but I just never would," says the Titanic star.

"We've all been through good and bad times in our lives and, just for me personally, I've always felt that those things have made me stronger, even if it was just being bullied as a kid at school.

"I'm kind of grateful for all those things even though that sounds a bit twisted. I just wouldn't erase anything."

Winslet's earning some of the best reviews of her career as crazy-haired romantic Clementine Kruczynski in the offbeat comedy-drama Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. In the film, her ex-boyfriend (played by Jim Carrey) discovers that she's had all her memories of their relationship erased from her mind.

In her personal life, Winslet has married theatre and film director Sam Mendes and they have a son, Joe, born last December. She also has a three-and-a-half year old daughter, Mia, by her first husband, Jim Threapleton.

Juggling motherhood and acting is something she's used to doing, and points out that she's luckier than some other mothers. "I frankly would like to ask the majority of mothers who have nine-to-five jobs how the hell they do it because I've never had to do that," she says.

"Admittedly when I'm working it's on a film set and I'm up at 5.30am and gone from the house at 6am, and more often than not you get back around dinner/bath-time. But honestly, the way I do it is that I don't do it that much.

"I've got two new films coming out this year - the other is Neverland - and, from the outside looking in, it seems 'she's been so busy'. In actual fact, that's not the case. I really stick to this thing of doing one film a year, maybe two if the shooting schedule is very short."

Winslet certainly doesn't feel that she's not working enough. It means when she does work she's really excited about it, and has lots of time to prepare and to chill out afterwards. "It's so exhausting and incredibly hard work. You don't just turn up on day one and it all comes to you," she says.

"I always prepare myself as well as I possibly can, which takes up time and energy. I'm so lucky that I can choose not to do it all the time and lucky to have the choice in terms of the roles I play. So that makes me appreciate it all the more."

Playing Eternal Sunshine's Clementine was exhausting, not just because the character has so many layers and emotional levels, but because of the less-than-straightforward way in which the story is told.

Some days she felt like John Cleese, she says. "I'd be like, 'just stop moving'. You know when you watch him in Fawlty Towers and you just want to grab him and force him to keep his feet on the ground and stay still.

"You very much had to know what you were doing every single day. Sometimes we'd have really long pages of dialogue, a scene of 11 or 12 pages long, which is virtually unheard of in a movie script.

"That's a lot of hard work. You have to learn all those lines way in advance so that when you get to the take you don't blow one because you've forgotten what your next line is. So it was quite exhausting, but so much fun I was happy to be that tired."

Eternal Sunshine director Michel Gondry has said that, like Clementine, she's headstrong, passionate and unpredictable. Winslet agrees she's headstrong and passionate.

"My dad loves telling us stories over and over again about what our childbirth experiences were like for him and my mother, and apparently I came shooting out, cord round the neck, screaming my head off, ready for action. So I guess I'm both of those things," she says.

"And I suppose I'm a bit unpredictable too. I don't like planning too much. Normally actors who are asked what they're doing next day, go 'well, I'm doing so-and-so, and after that I'm doing blah'.

"I'm just not like that. I don't know what's going to be happening in my life in a year's time and that always for me comes first. I like to keep it like that. It's fun and does make life more exciting."

Winslet has now come to terms with Titanic, no longer feeling overshadowed by the movie that's the highest-grossing film of all time. In fact, she's now able to be far more grateful than ever for the Titanic experience.

She'd love for her daughter Mia to see the movie but feels she's still too young. "I heard that one of her little friends, who's five, was watching it at Christmas. Apparently she said, 'look, Mia's mummy is hanging off the boat'," she says.

"To me, that is a great thing. I just loved the fact that I was Mia's mummy and she wasn't remotely interested in the character names or anything like that. It was just Mia's mummy playing dress-up and pretending to be somebody else."

* Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 29/04/2004