Best Actress: Kate Winslet's Moment

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"I come from a long line of real cart horses," says Winslet the day after the lunch. "Very stoic, insides-made-of-iron people. So I can take any s___ you can fling at me. I can cope with any workload. I can deal with lack of sleep. I can multitask like you've no idea. But two weeks ago, I actually had a panic attack." She leans forward on a sofa in Mendes' production office in Manhattan's shabby-glam Meatpacking District and smiles. "My first one. I didn't know what it was! It was a little like when your water [breaks], and you think, Did I just pee a bit, or is this it? I called my sister and said, 'I can't breathe, and I feel like I've got a brick on my chest and I'm seeing funny, and it sounds like everyone's talking to me in Hebrew.' She said, 'Yeah, that's a panic attack.'" (See pictures of movie costumes.)

That seems a reasonable reaction for someone who has spent the decade since the historic success of Titanic making sure she's an actress first and a celebrity only when useful; the YouTube universe, in which every utterance is rewound, scrutinized and parsed, is new to her. When she succumbed to some teary emotionalism at the Globes, the Times of London called her acceptance speech a "disaster" and warned direly that her exuberance was insensitive to the "darker, crueller" mood of an America in economic collapse. Try processing critiques like that while smiling warmly on camera as Oprah Winfrey tells you how much she approves of your implant-free breasts. You'd hyperventilate too — especially if, for the first time in memory, you don't have a job lined up. After a couple of years of high-pressure work, Winslet hasn't chosen her next role and says she's looking forward to spending some time at home in a steady routine. But, she adds, "I know how long it's going to be before I feel, O.K., I really have to know what I'm doing next, or I'll freak out! I know myself, and it's only a matter of time."

For the most part, though, Winslet's professional m.o. isn't hysteria. "Once I've dealt with something, got it all out — you know, vomited and wept and had the big discussion," she says, "I move on." She approaches her characters with curiosity and determination, with an anatomist's keenness to discover what makes them tick rather than a narcissist's desire to refashion them into glibly "relatable" versions of herself. She annotates every corner of her script, which resides in a satchel with a Dictaphone, a notebook, a camera, a pencil case, snapshots and any other tools she thinks she'll need. She's hungry, persistent, questioning. Winslet says the only fight she and her husband ever had about Revolutionary Road happened at their dinner table one evening after Mendes, an Oscar winner for American Beauty, had spent a long rehearsal day doing exploratory character work with all her co-stars. (See pictures of movie posters.)

"Sam is brilliant at saying to actors, 'Tell me about this character: Does she go to church? What does she think about at 11 in the morning?' " says Winslet. "I kept waiting for my turn." It never came. "He took it for granted that I was ready, and he said, 'I can't talk about it 24 hours a day.' And I just lost it. I said, 'I'm sorry, but you're gonna have to. You're my director, and if I wasn't playing April and the actress playing April phoned you, you'd leave your dinner to go cold and take that call for two hours in the other room! I know you would because I saw you do it with Jake Gyllenhaal!' " she says, recalling Jarhead and laughing as she re-creates her mini-tantrum.

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