Kate Winslet's challenging role: contemporary woman

07/12/2006

Kate Winslet struggled to play a modern Englishwoman in her new film The Holiday, because she's so used to starring in period dramas.

Winslet has portrayed an Edwardian socialite in Titanic, a 1970s hippy in Hideous Kinky and novelist Iris Murdoch in 1950s biopic Iris in recent years, with her only contemporary film roles being Americans.

In The Holiday, Winslet plays English journalist Iris who swaps houses with Californian Cameron Diaz's Amanda. She says, "It was the first time I've played a contemporary English woman.
"I was like, 'What do you mean I can't have a wig and an accent?' It was weird."