METHOD TO WINSLET'S MADNESS : PUTTING HERSELF THROUGH EMOTIONAL WRINGER IN ONE HYSTERICAL MOVIE ROLE AFTER ANOTHER, `JUDE' STAR FINDS REAL LIFE A GENUINE COMFORT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

You've got to have a pretty good head on your shoulders to act as madly as Kate Winslet does.

Just 21, the hypnotically vibrant English actress has gone murderously hysterical (``Heavenly Creatures''), romantically hysterical (``Sense and Sensibility'') and, in the just-released ``Jude'' - well, hysteria can't begin to describe what that poor woman goes through.

At the end of the year, Winslet will appear as one of literature's great loonies - Ophelia, in Kenneth Branagh's all-star, full-text movie of ``Hamlet.'' And she's currently in Baja filming ``Titanic'' for Jim Cameron, director of ``Aliens,'' ``The Abyss'' and the ``Terminator'' movies. Yeah, nothing nutty there.

``There is an element of madness, sort of, to what I do,'' Winslet acknowledged during a brief visit to L.A. from ``Titanic's'' Rosarito, Mexico, location. ``But I try not to think about that too much.''

Actually, Winslet's mind seems so thoroughly engaged in her work, it's left her little room for even the more conventional craziness of youth.

``I've never done the teen-age thing of clubbing every weekend; it's just not me,'' Winslet revealed. ``My best friend isn't like that either, but sometimes we say to each out other, `Oh, for heaven's sake, let's be 20! Let's just put on loads of makeup and dress up in completely crazy clothes, go to a club and take drugs.' But we're so completely not into drugs or any of that sort of thing that we decide, `No, let's just go out to dinner and drink some nice wine and be terribly sort of sophisticated.' I'm not really like that, either; but i'm just more comfortable with an easiness of living in that sort of way.''

Perhaps that's why Winslet chooses to put herself through the emotional wringer when she works; or maybe, conversely, easy living is all she has the strength for after a job. Take Sue Bridehead, the headstrong and rebellious heroine of Thomas Hardy's final novel, ``Jude the Obscure.'' A feminist before her time, she rejects religion, proper marriage and most of the other social norms of late-Victorian England.

But the initially vivacious Sue also suffers immense emotional pain by not acknowledging her passion for her adoring cousin Jude Fawley (Christopher Eccleston from ``Shallow Grave''). When she finally does act on her feelings, things go from heartbreaking to devastatingly tragic. For an actress who was still in her teens when she made the movie, approximating Sue's complex humors and impossible burdens was a demanding order.

``At times it was hell, it has to be said,'' Winslet admitted. ``Because of the depth and the rather alien quality of the emotions. It was very hard indeed, and I had to be very strong and very brave about a lot of things. I had to understand, OK, I know this one's going to hurt because I have to think about that part of my life or that aspect of it that I've chosen to bury or whatever. I had to do that a lot.''

She also had to find a way, with director Michael Winterbottom, to make Sue easier for herself and modern audiences to relate to than the Hardy original.

``Sue in the novel is a complete cow,'' Winslet stated bluntly. ``She's 100 percent relentless, yet she's exhausting, she's so neurotic. You just wanted to give her a good kick on the backside and say get on with it.

``I didn't want to play that. I wanted to find a depth to her, reasons for why she was behaving the way that she was behaving. You had to really feel her insecurity and the loneliness she felt at times in her life and her desperation to be an independent woman.''

But even made somewhat more palatable, the film's outspoken Sue wouldn't last too long at a Jane Austen dinner party. Not to say that Austen didn't create complex, intelligent 19th-century women - Winslet earned an Oscar nomination playing one in ``Sense and Sensibility.'' But the actress feels strongly that British cinema needs to address the culture's darker literary past as enthusiastically as it tackles the classier classics.

`` `Jude' is in-your-face harsh reality, and it's bloody raw,'' she said. ``It's a tonic to the well-mannered, Austen type of thing. It's important that we get this degree of harsh realism with period pieces, as opposed to this rather lovely kind of feel of things, this graceful way of living. It wasn't like that for everybody.''

Not that it's in any way gentle, but ``Hamlet'' naturally bears the Shakespeare stamp of erudite classicism. Winslet said filming it opposite Branagh - who played the Danish prince as well as directed the movie - was hardly an academic exercise.

``As a director, Ken has the ability to somehow put his soul into his hand, take his hand and put it into your mouth, down through your throat, grab onto your soul, hold onto it and stay there, right with you, as you are acting,'' she described rather dizzyingly. ``It's just amazing.''

Winslet seems even more impressed by the bruises she suffered for the Bard.

``When I was doing the madness scenes, I was repeatedly throwing myself through doors onto floors,'' she noted. ``I was in a straitjacket, so my arms couldn't break the falls. Then there were the `Get thee to a nunnery' scenes, where Ken was slamming me up against a mirror and dragging me by my hair. At one point, I had a lump about half the size of an ostrich egg on my thigh.''

So far, ``Titanic'' hasn't been quite that bad. ``The whole of one arm and half the other is completely covered with bruises,'' she said after two weeks of shooting the sinking-ship epic. ``I think I'm a bit of a masochist, really. I don't feel I've done my job properly unless I come out at the end feeling I've suffered in some way.''

OK, so she is a little nuts. But her dedicated daring is only one side of Winslet's screen appeal. The other part comes from the maturity of feeling, far beyond her years, that she puts across so vibrantly.

Winslet gives a lot of credit for that to her parents, Roger and Sally, theater people whom she credits with always treating her like an adult.

``It's not just because I've been working professionally as an actress since I was 13,'' Winslet said. ``My parents, who are such wonderful people, have always been friends. They've never been order-givers. They've just allowed us to be who we are, whatever that might be; they've just loved us, whatever we've been.''

A job that sometimes requires confronting madness, however, has also provided a path to a very adult kind of self-discovery for Kate Winslet.

``I love acting so much, but when you have to detach yourself from reality sometimes and delve deep, deep down to such tough emotion, I think you do force yourself to grow up,'' she said. ``Not necessarily quicker, but you do have to be very mature about the situation.

``That creates a kind of determination that I think most young people just don't have. Maybe they do, and that's an unfair thing to say, but as an actor you just have to have that so much more. You have to stay in your own head about it and hold onto your soul, be very grown-up about it all.''

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Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Kiss me, Kate

Smart and sexy Ka te Winslet has Hollywood going made for her

(2) `I love acting so much, but when you have to detach yourself from reality sometimes and delve deep, deep down to such tough emotion, I think you do force yourself to grow up.'

Kate Winslet