Disparate housewives

NEW YORK

Kate Winslet wants you to know she is not like Sarah Pierce. She doesn't have to say it. The moment the actress starts talking about her two young children, she's as removed from her most recent film role as baby formula is from gin. Which makes the performance the more startling: In ``Little Children," the film adaptation of the book by Belmont-based novelist Tom Perrotta, Winslet plays a suburban mom who's an emotional toxic dump. Sarah has a 4-year-old daughter (Sadie Goldstein) she doesn't much like, a workaholic husband (Gregg Edelman) who has an online porn addiction, a giant house with furniture not her own, and a panicky sense that she's trapped for life. Skulking around the fringes of the local playground, Sarah drifts into an affair with a stay-at-home dad (Patrick Wilson) who has his own problems. The film, which opens Friday, has been directed by Todd Field with the same nuanced eye for middle-class disaster he brought to 2001's Oscar-nominated ``In the Bedroom."

Ask Winslet about her own feelings on parenthood, though, and she turns into a right Mary Poppins. ``I could tell you now, without looking at my watch, what both of my children are doing," the star says calmly. ``My daughter is at school and she'll be finishing in about 20 minutes. My son is in the playground playing with two little friends of his who are girls and he will have had pizza for lunch because we go for pizza on Thursdays.

``That's my focus. That's my backdrop. But Sarah wasn't that person and it was hard for me playing someone who wasn't a very good mother, to put it bluntly."

Well, that's why they call it acting. Despite the distance Winslet had to travel to become Sarah Pierce -- sunken in mini van misery then lit up with lust -- she convincingly makes the journey. The best thing in a very good movie, the performance has become the focus of early awards-season talk after ``Little Children" conquered the fall festival circuit (Telluride, Deauville, Toronto, New York). Winslet uses such exterior trappings as unplucked eyebrows and dowdy clothing to establish the character's misfit-in-suburbia persona, but the fear in Sarah's eyes and the delusionary sense of sexual freedom are powerful and self-generated.

During a talk on a sunny late September afternoon in New York City, that character is a world away. Dressed with casual crispness in black slacks, shirt, and sweater, the actress presents an engaging professional version of herself. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette -- her one remaining concession to sin, apparently -- she flicks the ashes into the tin lid of a jar of gummi bears and parses aspects of this strange woman she found herself playing.

``There's a part in the novel where we learn she had a slightly bisexual past in college," Winslet says of Sarah. ``She was very literary-minded; she had great aspirations to travel. To me, that said a huge amount about how suffocated this woman was feeling. This was somebody who had been quite daring in her life, and I loved the fact that when she dares herself to kiss that man by the swing set, suddenly she finds a part of herself that she had been out of touch with for years."

Winslet, 31, is famous for speaking her mind about matters of art and body image, but she now appears to choose her words with more care than in her headstrong 20s, after 1997's ``Titanic" made her a global superstar and subsequent film choices established her as a major talent and very smart cookie. ``Freedom of choice," she says . ``That's the great privilege I've been afforded the last 10 years, since the success of `Titanic' predominantly, and it's meant I've been able to play so many different parts, try out so many different things, work with amazing people and just keep learning. I never want to get to a point where I feel like I know how to do it all. You can't have all the answers. There's no right or wrong way with acting, ever."

There is a right way and a wrong way to motherhood, and Winslet has no interest in exploring the wrong way. A brief marriage at 25 to British assistant director Jim Threapleton went sour but not before producing daughter Mia in 2000; a subsequent marriage to director Sam Mendes (``American Beauty") resulted in Joe, born in 2003. The family lives in New York, LA, and London.

Parenthood has energized Winslet at the same time it seems to have rooted her in permanence. She admits she couldn't have played Sarah before having her own children: ``It's put so many emotional tools in my little toolbox when it comes to building a character. It forces you to be responsible and passionate and grown-up, and it also reminds you of how to be a child again yourself.

``But I was able to see Sarah in a very objective way," she continues, ``and even a critical way at times. If I'd been playing this part six years ago, before having kids myself, I would have felt, `Oh, she's just like me, I've felt so lost, and oh God, I've felt trapped and emotionally stifled.' " Winslet does a very nice mock thespic swoon. ``Actresses can be pretty [expletive] indulgent human beings when it comes to emotions, and it's great to be allowed to be like that sometimes. But when you're a parent, you can't indulge in your own stuff because you're so busy indulging in two other little people.

``If I get 15 minutes -- the kids are at school, everyone's brushed their teeth, they've eaten -- I can sit with a coffee and call a girl-friend, and just have a chin-wag. That little moment is enough. So I did understand that need in Sarah, but in her it's a desperation. She doesn't know how to be a parent and in some ways she gets it all wrong -- she thinks that being a parent means that she's losing out on life."

Winslet, by contrast, seems more herself these days. Ironically, this has freed up her acting. She works hard, and while some of the movies and performances don't connect (see 2003's ``The Life of David Gale" or the recent ``All the King's Men" -- or, rather, don't), Oscar nominations for 2001's ``Iris" and 2004's ``Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and her popular success as the doomed Sylvia Llewelyn Davis in ``Finding Neverland" have contributed to the sense of an actress at the top of her game.

``She has no vanity," confirms ``Little Children" co star Wilson. ``I mean, she is completely fearless. She could be like a lot of other actresses, who are just concentrated on image, but she puts her family first. When that's your priority, then your movies become your passion and your fun. So she fought to have blue toenails; she loves the nitty-gritty -- that's important to her."

``Yeah, I am headstrong," she says. ``Who I am in terms of the person I may come across as in an interview is very much who I really am. The only thing that might be different is that I possibly seem very calm, and as soon as I leave, I'm `Right, I've got to get home by 6:15, get the kids in bed by 7:15, quick bite to eat, then run to another Q&A.' Life is a juggle, as it is for most mothers who have a job and things to do. But I don't wear that much make up, I don't blow-dry my hair before I walk out of the house. I'm afraid I'm quite normal."

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.