This is a different sort of Kate Winslet than we’ve come to expect.

In “Labor Day” ― a romance, a drama, and a woman’s fantasy of what men, perhaps, should be ― the British actress plays Adele Wheeler, a fragile, frightened single mother too wary of the outside world to even get in the car and drive to the market.

The year is 1987, the place a small New Hampshire town. Adele’s 13-year-old boy (a very good Gattlin Griffith) has assumed many of the domestic responsibilities. There’s even an Oedipal tinge to their relationship.

Then, everything changes when a stranger ― with a limp and a bloody hole in his stomach ― enters the Wheelers’ quiet, tamped-down world. He’s an escaped convict (played by Josh Brolin), and over the course of director Jason Reitman’s film ― adapted from the Joyce Maynard novel ― Winslet’s broken bird, Adele, takes flight again.

“I hadn’t played a character who was so the opposite of the sort of strong, strident, more obviously passionate women that I think I’ve played in the past,” says Winslet, who has been nominated for six Oscars, winning the best actress trophy for her role in “The Reader” as a Nazi concentration camp guard trying to conceal her past in 1950s Germany.

“I was keen to explore somebody who was much more introverted and fragmented,” she says. “I was fascinated by that. I had played mothers, but I hadn’t really played a single mother to a son of that age. And that’s a particularly interesting dynamic. ...

“Also, I was drawn to the unexpected nature of the love story, which I found very moving.”

“Labor Day” premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival and landed Winslet a best actress Golden Globe nomination in December. Reitman, who made “Up In the Air” and “Young Adult,” is likewise trying something different here. The film’s tone is lushly romantic one minute, edgy and suspenseful another, and then, unexpectedly, something will happen that is funny, odd.

“Actually, I didn’t find the script, initially, humorous in any aspect at all,” Winslet confesses, on the phone from London. “I was actually quite surprised myself when I first saw the movie that there were a couple of moments when I found myself laughing in spite of the moment.”

Winslet, 38, was “very, very pregnant” when interviewed in late November. A few weeks later she was in a different kind of labor: On Dec. 7, she and her husband, Ned Rocknroll (nephew of Virgin billionaire Richard Branson), became parents of a baby boy, Bear. The actress has an older daughter and son, from respective marriages with film crew veteran Jim Threapleton and director Sam Mendes.

Adele’s transformation in “Labor Day” was tricky for Winslet. There was the danger of playing the indrawn, quaking, agoraphobic Adele with too much outward expression, and then the challenge of showing the sexually and spiritually reawakened woman without overplaying that, too.

“One can always be heavy-handed, and I’m not always the best gauge of how far I’m going, or how much further I maybe need to go,” she says.

Next up for Winslet is “The Dressmaker,” an adaptation of Rosalie Ham’s 2000 novel, to be directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse later this year. And the actress tries something different again in “Divergent” ― playing an out-and-out villain to Shailene Woodley’s teenage heroine ― in the “Hunger Games”-ish sci-fier, which opens next month.

Asked to look back at her career, Winslet considers three projects especially important to her development as an actress.

One is “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the 2004 Charlie Kaufman ― Michel Gondry love story ― reality check in which Winslet plays a free spirit named Clementine, with the orange hair to match.

“‘Eternal Sunshine’ really opened me up a lot,” she says. “I couldn’t be in any way self-conscious playing that brash, loud character. And really, having to do an effing good American accent ... I had to pull that off. I really felt like I had some personal breakthroughs within that experience that carried me into other things.”

Winslet cites “Little Children,” Todd Field’s 2009 take on the Tom Perotta novel, in which she played a mother and housewife who falls into an affair with a stay-at-home dad, as another formative experience. So, too, her Emmy-winning performance in the Todd Haynes-directed telefilm, “Mildred Pierce.”

“Actually, it’s very much about confidence-growing,” Winslet reflects. “Acting is so much about just actually having the confidence to step out there and do your best. And forget everything else ― all the b.s., all the fear, all the pressures that you put on yourself, and actually learning how to get rid of that stuff. And that can take quite a long time.”

By Steven Rea

(The Philadelphia Inquirer)

(MCT Information Services)