My most important role is at home

Winslet is sanguine about Oscar day itself. "I have always been able to really enjoy it. You are going to an event that people around the world would give their right arm to attend.

"When the day arrives you just gasp and it's nerve-wracking, but I am not a kind of stress-out/freak-out person, really I'm not."

Becoming a mother, she says, has helped her deal with the pressure of fame: "I have become even calmer since having children. As a parent you just can't be self-absorbed. Any self-indulgence, neurosis and panic, that's just gone. It's just been eradicated."

Winslet lives a bi-continental lifestyle, shuttling Mia, six, and Joe, three, between the UK and New York, home of her husband, the equally lauded American Beauty director Sam Mendes. You get the impression she wants you to believe she is really one of us.

"I am not a big luxury person, I am not into glamour. Our home and our life isn't like that. Our life at home is real; we don't have seven cars and 25 houses. Or even 25 bedrooms. That would make me feel extremely uncomfortable."

For the past nine months, Winslet has been on her year off. The films she has starred in were all made by last May, and instead she has devoted her time to her children and immersed herself in domestic ordinariness.

"I wish I could tell you I'd been doing a Prue Leith cookery course or learned French. I am not organised in myself that way at all. I am incredibly organised with my kids and my family, but when it comes to me, I can't even get my act together to go to the gym.

"The year off was for two reasons, the main one being just wanting to be with the kids. As opposed to being with the kids and work." She raises an eyebrow for effect.

When she talks she looks right at you, rather fearlessly. She throws her opinions at you, and does not seek out your approval. So was it hard for her to leave her children to go to work?

"I have never been in a position where I had to leave them to go to work. Sam and I take it in turns to work. We always work it out as a family, and it's great. The kids are fantastically stable as a result."

But visits to the set are a rare treat. "I don't drag them along and leave them with a box of crayons. And also, if they are around, I find I cannot concentrate because my focus shifts to them and I am thrown by it.

"Those visits are special, we really build them up. Now that Mia is six she begins to understand it and is fascinated."

Once she decided she would take time off, Kate took on a rapid succession of roles. She starred in Little Children, was the voice of a grungy heroine rat in Flushed Away, worked opposite Jude Law in All the King's Men and finally acted in her first romantic comedy, The Holiday.

"I did more because I knew I had the year off and I wanted to get a whole bunch of it out of my system."

How much does her family influence her choice of work? "Only when it comes to logistics. Less in terms of 'Do I love the script?', but more 'Where is it going to shoot? Timbuktu? Don't think we can go there.'

"But I have to be honest: has it changed how I make choices? It really hasn't. I never liked anything violent, even before I had kids. I am not into it; it does not float my boat.

"I've definitely changed as an actress since having kids. There's been more emotionally available to me because I have experienced it."

I can't help wondering if the divorce from her first husband Jim Threapleton in 2001 was an emotional learning-curve for her.

She beams. "I have never had problems crying on screen, but now I really don't have a problem. I think you just become completely smushy when you are a parent."

Free time has become a distant memory for Kate. "I don't actually have any time for myself. Work almost becomes like a break, because having two kids takes a lot.

"I get time for myself, weirdly, when I work. Sometimes you find yourself with an hour where they change a lighting set-up and I don't know what to do with myself.

"When you become a parent you forget to be by yourself, you think: phone - who should I phone? Time on my own is a long bath or time with Sam. Going out for a drink or something. And those little things become really enjoyable and important."

Kate Winslet is an interesting paradox - she puts her family first yet is extremely driven. Not just thorough and practical in her approach to her parts, but excited by who else she can be and compelled to explore her talent and extend her range.

"I am very lucky that I get a lot of very, very different material to read, like Little Children. I love the fact that I get to see tiny scripts, films that would not necessarily see the light of day if it wasn't for bigger actors getting involved with them."

She does not fear that a younger and prettier actress will replace her on the red carpet or the Oscar nominations list but you get the sense Winslet is cramming in as much work as she can while she's in demand.

"To say I am not driven would be stupid. Because when I am at work I am incredibly driven and determined and all of those things. I have this feeling that I have got to be out there all the time and make the most of this moment because it will go and never come back.

"But I don't have an agenda and I'm not neurotic either. I don't have that kind of panic thing. I mean, listen, when I am 35 I might be saying something completely different. So far, so good."

Has Mia inherited the Winslet family thespic gene? "There were flickers of it when she was four. She was a very flamboyant and expressive kid, but now she has calmed down a little.

"There was a moment where I thought "Oh, my God, she could really end up doing this for a living!" and I wasn't sure how I felt about this. I know from my parents, when I said that was what I wanted to do, it was a big deal.

"My father was a struggling actor for most of his life; both my sisters act and they are not struggling at the moment but it can be a very hard life.

"When a parent has experienced heartache and struggle from the thing they love most and which they do for a living, of course, it makes sense that they'd be concerned about their child going in for it. My dad was very much: OK, ach f***."

When she talks about her father, you feel just a flicker of who Kate really is. She makes a point of being so open about certain aspects of her life that you cannot help feeling she is hiding other parts of herself. A notion she acknowledges unapologetically.

"If I told you exactly what I was like, basically you would be in the position that my husband is in, because he and my kids are the only people who really know what I am like.

"This is me; I am this person, what you see is what you get. I don't change when I am on a film set, I am still completely the same person, and I don't become a freak who's banging their head in a corner.

"I am very practical, that's the one thing I would say about myself. Organised and straightforward. What can I say, I am fabulous!"