Kate Winslet

LONDON - It's Saturday afternoon in the jam-packed Old Red Lion on London's shopper-crowded St. John Street. Beer-fueled chatter - including some salty heckles - ricochets off the TV screens, while the pub's lone server pours pints of frothy ale in double-quick time. Local soccer team Arsenal is playing, and the game isn't going well. Nestled among the red-shirted lager lovers are several quiet imbibers, their tables topped with glasses of wine and the occasional well-thumbed paperback.

Kate Winslet held in the tears but not the earthy remembrance of standing in front of the mirror as an 8-year-old kid, pretending her shampoo bottle was an Oscar. Accepting the lead actress trophy for her performance as a former German concentration camp guard in "The Reader," she noted gaily, "Well, it's not a shampoo bottle now!" To her fellow nominees, she said, "I think we can't all believe we're in the same category as Meryl Streep at all."

THE little children in "Little Children" are the adults, starting with Kate Winslet's Sarah, an overeducated suburban mom deadened by marriage to a slug who wears women's underwear on his head. Among the film's first words of dialogue are "Bad mommy! Bad mommy!," an invective from her daughter in the playground where Sarah eyes an equally un-adult househusband dubbed the "Prom King" by neighborhood women.

It's the stuff movies are made of, but this time it was real life: Actress Kate Winslet reportedly rescued billionaire Richard Branson's elderly mother from a burning home on Branson's private island in the Caribbean. And actor Ryan Gosling allegedly put himself in the middle of a heated New York City street fight, breaking it up. Should we consider these two celebrities heroes? And are most other people capable of the same -- of putting themselves in harm's way to help someone else?

Rarely is a scene as heartbreaking and hard-earned as the final one in HBO's "Mildred Pierce," when Mildred's ex-husband pushes her to finally detach from Veda, the gifted daughter who has given her so much grief. "To hell with her," Bert coaches gruffly, pointing Kate Winslet's Mildred down the only path to her emotional survival. "All right, Bert," she manages through her tears. "To hell with her. " Many months later, Winslet says she is finally able to get some perspective on the process that went into her performance, one of the most talked-about elements of a production that was exceptional on many counts.

Kate Winslet is poised to be the darling of the upcoming award season. She stars with Ralph Fiennes in "The Reader," based on Bernard Schlink's bestselling novel about a young man's passionate affair during WWII with an older woman whom he meets again when she is tried for war crimes. Winslet also reunites this season with "Titanic" costar Leonardo DiCaprio in "Revolutionary Road," directed by her husband, Sam Mendes ("American Beauty").

Talk about pressure. Newcomer David Kross faced a starring role in "The Reader" opposite five-time Oscar nominee Kate Winslet, a role in which he'd be the one required to convey the emotional complexity and ambiguity of the film. Nerve-racking for a young performer, right? It gets worse. The film is also the German actor's first English-speaking role. Oh, and did we mention that Kross is just 18 and the movie required sex scenes and full frontal nudity?

Enough with the suffering. Kate Winslet's killing herself for an Oscar. The 33-year-old actress has gone down with the Titanic for James Cameron, lost her memory in Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," endured an unhappy marriage and a lingering pedophile in Todd Field's "Little Children," played the Alzheimer's-doomed poet Iris Murdoch in Richard Eyre's "Iris," and courted heartache as Marianne Dashwood in Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility."