Reading's favourite daughter Kate Winslet has started the year with a bang.

Already gracing the big screen in The Reader, which has been tipped for Oscars, she is now promoting her next Hollywood flick, Revolutionary Road, which is due out at the end of the month, and has just been voted one of the most beautiful women of 2008.

However despite the heady heights of international fame she has not forgotten her roots and was due back in town over the festive period to catch up with family and, of course, sample her mum’s Christmas batch of prize-winning pickled onions.

Speaking to the Evening Post’s Kim Francis in today’s entertainment supplement 24Seven about The Reader and Revolutionary Road, Kate revealed she’s still a Reading girl at heart.

She told 24Seven: “We spend a lot of time in Reading when we’re in England.

“We live in Oxfordshire so we’re always visiting. It’s just the way it always was, in and out of each other’s houses. You know, kind of sleeping in everybody else’s beds.

“It’s very much the family that it always has been.”

This week the actress was ranked third in a list of Beauty Icons of the Year (2008) drawn up by research from Superdrug, adding another accolade to what is already a healthy-looking list, although it is missing that elusive Oscar.

The former Starmaker Theatre Company pupil also told us she and director husband Sam Mendes, who is also from Reading, have compared notes about the town with its other famous export, Ricky Gervais.

Mum-of-two Kate, 33, whose parents, Sally and Roger, live in West Reading, said: “We have compared – ‘What school did you go to?’, ‘Oh, no way!  Oh, my god!  Oh, I really wanted to go to that school – really good drama department; didn’t like the maths teacher’. It is funny.”

She added: “He’s [Ricky] very much a Reading boy through and through. He’s really got the accent still too, which weirdly I almost never had.

“I think [that’s] because so many members of my family had been trained as actors and so they always spoke quite well, including myself and my sisters and my brother. I think you just kind of hear it – the language of your family – you pick up that dialect as opposed to the dialect of the place you come from.

“But every now and then my dad would go very Reading!”

On her next flick Revolutionary Road, released on Friday, January 30, which reunites Kate with her Titanic partner Leonardo DiCaprio, she got to spend more time with her husband when for the first time in her career she worked under his direction.

- For the full interview see The Big Chat in 24Seven free with today’s Evening Post

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