Winslet comfortable in her skin; a good thing for steamy ‘Reader’

For Kate Winslet, the biggest challenge of “The Reader” was getting into the emotional skin of her character, a former SS guard who has an affair with a boy half her age. But when it came to her own skin – well, the curvaceous mother of two had no problem going buck-naked for numerous sex scenes with her teenage co-star.

“I'm a relatively healthy person mentally. I don't have a lot of hang-ups and issues,” says the British leading lady who has become known for encouraging women to accept their bodies and reject Hollywood's obsession with stick figures. “As time goes by and when you have children, you know, vanity schmanity. It all goes out the window.”

Besides, Winslet, 33, says her main concern during filming was for her 18-year-old co-star, David Kross. The young German actor had never shot a love scene before, let alone multiple ones with a five-time Oscar nominee. And much of the first half of the intense post-World War II drama revolves around the erotic escapades between Winslet's steely character, Hanna, who is an illiterate tram ticket-taker with a secret Third Reich past, and Kross'vulnerable Michael, a 15-year-old who reads her Chekhov and other classics before they hit the sack.

“Those scenes, of course, are tense-making,” Winslet says. “My biggest concern to be honest was that David felt comfortable. I wanted him to know I had been there. I remember dreading shooting my first love scene as a 19-year-old in 'Jude.' Every day, I got closer and closer to it, I felt more and more terrified because I simply didn't know what was going to happen.

“So just for him to hear me say, 'I get it. I'm there for you. Don't worry. I'll look after you.' And to be able to say, 'You know, there's only going to be maybe three people in the room.' That was a huge thing for him to hear – he thought there was going to be an entire crew of people whom he had become very friendly with in the room.”

Keenly aware that the underage aspect is controversial, Winslet is quick to point out that the filmmakers waited until Kross turned 18 before they shot the love scenes in Germany. “Someone who was 14 or 15, of course, morally that might've been an issue for me. He wasn't. He was an adult. And also I so believed in the relationship between Hanna and Michael and so believed they entered into that relationship on an equal footing.”

In the movie, which was directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”) and based on the international best-seller, the thirtysomething Hanna suddenly disappears from her home one day. The next time Michael sees her, he is a law student and she is a middle-aged defendant in a Nazi war-crimes trial. In the courtroom, Hanna admits she helped select which concentration camp prisoners would be exterminated and accepts blame for allowing 300 Jewish women and children to perish in a fire.

Winslet was tapped to play the complex fictional character several years ago, but she had to bail because of a conflict in filming “Revolutionary Road” (opening here Jan. 9), which reunited her with “Titanic” co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. Nicole Kidman was then cast as Hanna, but during pre-production, she stepped aside after becoming pregnant. The role once again went to Winslet. (Should anyone doubt her acting chops, there's buzz that Winslet could be nominated for Oscars again for both “The Reader” and “Revolutionary Road.”)

Because of her busy schedule, Winslet says she only had two months to prepare for “The Reader” before cameras rolled. To delve into the mysterious character's head, she first educated herself about SS guards, researching, for instance, how they applied for jobs and what walks of life they came from. She spent hours watching documentaries about the Holocaust.

“You see things you can never unsee. You hear things you can never unhear. I did find that extremely upsetting,” says Winslet from New York, where she shares a home with “Revolutionary Road” director and husband Sam Mendes. It is her second marriage and she has one child from each.

She recalls spending so much time poring over Bernhard Schlink's book, “The Reader” (which was also an Oprah's Book Club pick), that the pages began falling out. “I feel like I still haven't really put it down. It doesn't really even resemble a book anymore, the number of times it had to be pasted back.”

But most importantly to understanding Hanna, Winslet says she hung out with adults who were learning to read and write at the nonprofit, New York-based Literacy Partners.

“It's a disability. It forces every aspect of (Hanna's) life. It forms who she is. It was a key part, if not a main part, of why she was forced to make a choice to become an SS guard and ended up contributing to the greatest crimes committed against humanity. So understanding what it was like to be an illiterate person was key.

“I literally went to class with illiterate men and women who are learning to read and write at the age of 22 and sometimes at the age of 62. And that was really important and valuable to me, because they shared their stories – how it was that they had never been educated, why they were never able to get over the shame they felt that they couldn't read or write.”

Toward the end of the movie, Michael is in his 40s (and played by Ralph Fiennes) and Hanna is a dowdy matron whose face and body show the harsh wear of bygone decades and prison. Winslet says she spent seven hours in makeup to achieve the aging process.

“As one gets older, things go south and expand sometimes. To create the movement, we couldn't do that with a bunch of padding. Everything was prosthetic – everything on my face and head to, you know, my bingo wings and back fat and breasts and stomach and thighs. It was a fascinating process to me. I had never experienced working with prosthetic material before in my life.

“There was nothing about it that freaked me out or frightened me. People kept saying, 'How does it feel to look in the mirror and see yourself as an older person?', and I'd say, 'Great.' I was so intrigued by it.”

As the younger Hanna, Winslet was just as comfortable parading around in the buff. After all, the actress is famous for once blasting GQ magazine when it airbrushed her to look thinner. And she's talked about the sting from schoolmates calling her Blubber when she was a teen. So it makes sense she's not one to fret about showing her imperfect pear-shaped physique on-screen.

“I have never been offered a body double in my life. I've never had a body double in my life. And if I was offered a body double, I would categorically refuse to have one,” she says.

In one climatic scene, there's a closeup of Hanna's calloused and bunion-covered feet, again the result of movie makeup.

“If you look closely, you'll see that they're big, those feet on screen,” says the 5-foot-6 actress. “I'm a size 11½. I know it's shocking, right? It's horrifying. They were my feet.”

She laughs. Maybe she's faking it, but the movie queen sounds well-grounded, especially when it comes to the unceasing media attention that zeroes in whether she's on or off-camera.

“I had my fair share of scrutiny in my early 20s, and I taught myself to turn a blind eye. Quite frankly, if you pay attention to it too much, then it will get to you,” Winslet says. “You really have to not look at those photographs and read that stuff. To be honest, all I care about is being me. It's literally all I know to do.” Norma Meyer is a Los Angeles-based writer.