Entertainment

Kate Winslet has her pick of choice parts in Hollywood. That's what four Oscar nominations will do for you. So it's curious that she would choose to play Sarah in the suburban drama Little Children, the adaptation of the Tom Perrotta novel that opens Friday.

DIMA GAVRYSH/AP

The director of Little Children calls Kate Winslet 'the ideal collaborator.'

For Sarah isn't the most likable person. She cheats on her husband with the hunky stay-at-home dad (Patrick Wilson) she meets at the park, though some will argue her husband had it coming. And she treats her young daughter like a set of keys: an item to think about only when it's missing.

But for Ms. Winslet, developing a role is about finding something in common with the character. Unlike Sarah, she's got two kids she never leaves at home for work, and she's happily married to American Beauty director Sam Mendes.

"Obviously I'm nothing like her. But I think there are parts of her that I have been. I have experienced a lot of her – that loneliness and that desperate search for happiness," the 31-year-old actress said by phone from New York recently. "I just felt I understood her. And the fact that there were some parts of her that I didn't necessarily like and respect, that comes hand-in-hand with playing a character sometimes."

Her open-mindedness is part of what intrigued Little Children director Todd Field. Mr. Field, who played Tom Cruise's pianist buddy in Eyes Wide Shut, says he and his lead actress share a similar approach to filmmaking.

"You come to every piece of work trying to be humble and knowing that you don't know what you're going to do yet. You haven't done it before, and you try to figure out a way to execute that. And that's something that she understands very, very well," Mr. Field said by phone from New York last week. "She's kind of the ideal collaborator you could ever want to have."

It's that willingness to stretch that has separated her from other actresses her age. Where others may look for an easy payday and a chance to look pretty on-screen, Ms. Winslet chooses roles such as the overall-wearing, unkempt Sarah in Little Children and the crazy-haired Clementine, the object of Jim Carrey's affections in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (for which she earned one of those Oscar noms).

Intellectual stimulation keeps things interesting, she says.

"When you're given an opportunity to play a part that is going to be so challenging and so difficult, it's part of the actor's privilege to see how far you can push yourself," she said. "And whenever I have the feeling when I read a script and I think, 'God, this is so brilliant. But why the hell do they want me to play this part?' That's when I think, 'OK, now you should be seriously considering this, Kate.' "

So it may come as a surprise that her next two films are the animated Flushed Away in November and The Holiday, due in December. She has done voice work before, but Holiday marks her first romantic comedy. Most actresses her age have made a living on the genre, but she has avoided it.

In fact, for the last decade, she has more or less avoided The Big Hollywood Movie. After starring in the biggest one of them all, Titanic, she's chosen smaller films with meatier rolls. When others would have cashed in and starred in the surefire moneymaker, Ms. Winslet followed Titanic with the tiny Hideous Kinky, a period film set in Morocco.

She says that while reading the Holiday script, she finally felt that it had been long enough since Titanic to consider a broad crowd-pleaser again.

"I certainly had the feeling of, 'Well, maybe now it's time again. Perhaps I can do something that's more mainstream and feel OK about that,' " she said.

But even the Nancy Meyers-directed Holiday provided the challenge she seeks. In the film, she temporarily swaps her English home with Cameron Diaz's Los Angeles pad as each hopes to escape her man problems. Ms. Winslet has played all kinds of parts, but this most basic role was actually something new for her.

"I get to play a contemporary Englishwoman for the first time ever in a movie. I've never played a modern English chick. I've only ever played period English people. I've played contemporary American people, but not English, until now. Which, bizarrely, was a new opportunity," she said, laughing. "It was weird to do that. I didn't have anything to hide behind – I didn't have a wig, I didn't have an accent, I couldn't hide behind anything. This woman was very much a version of myself."

Will we see more of the true Kate in the future? After The Holiday , she says she's taking a year off, as she has "run out of stuff." But you can bet that when she is recharged, she'll be looking for a challenge.

E-mail sbecker@dallasnews.com