Kate Winslet has an impressive career involving some 20 films and multiple Oscar nominations and all that -- but when she says, "I honestly felt as if I'd won that last golden ticket," about being cast in All The King's Men, you believe her.

Winslet, who visited Toronto during last week's film festival, is part of the impressive cast of All The King's Men, an epic retelling of the Robert Penn Warren novel about politics and corruption. The film opens here Friday, and the players are Sean Penn, Jude Law, Sir Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson and Kathy Baker; it's directed by Steve Zaillian. Winslet claims that she was the last person cast and felt lucky for it.

"It was one of those impossibly glorious opportunities. To work with that cast, that director, that script -- which was so delicate and powerful and beautifully layered."

Sean Penn stars in All The King's Men as Willie Stark, an idealist who becomes governor of Louisiana and quickly learns to embrace the corruption that goes with the post. Jude Law plays Willie Stark's sidekick, Jack Burden, and Winslet is Anne Stanton, the woman Jack Burden has loved from afar most of his life. All The King's Men is loosely based on the career of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana.

Winslet was in another film at the festival this year called Little Children, Todd Field's film about identity and relationships. And parenthood. The film co-stars Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Connelly and will open in Toronto in the coming months. Little Children has a couple of nude scenes, about which Winslet jokes, "That's it! I can't do it again! I've had two kids!"

She continues, cheerfully, "I suppose it will be quite good to look back on when I'm 60, and I can go, 'Aha! Look what I did! And I'd had two children at the time!'

But I remember walking in to do it, thinking, 'How am I going to pull this off? The belly is certainly not what it was. The boobs are certainly not what they were.' You do think, 'Oh, God!' but at the same time, I was playing a mother, and it's so important to me to have those things look as real as possible."

Winslet, who turns 31 next month, has a daughter of 6 from her brief first marriage to Jim Threapleton, and she and husband Sam Mendes have a toddler son. She's besotted with her children. That made her role in Little Children a bit tough, says the actress, as she had to play a woman who mostly ignores her daughter.

"It was difficult to play someone so out of touch with her own child. She just didn't know how to be a parent, really didn't know how, and was waiting for someone to show her, in a way, and no one ever did, so she just fumbled along and accepted her lot in life and tried to hang onto something for herself. She's a deeply confused, lost, lonely woman."

Winslet drew a little on her own experiences for the role. "Obviously I did delve into myself for a lot of that character, but there was a period in my life when I'd lived in London as a single woman, and then I was in a relationship -- I'm going to try to be nonspecific -- in which neither party was happy, and we chose to move and live in the suburbs at that time. And I absolutely identified with those feelings of being trapped and suffocated."

It's difficult to imagine a free spirit like Winslet ever feeling trapped by anything. An actress since childhood, Winslet grew up in what she describes as a large, loving, chaotic family -- a family mostly of actors. Her parents are both stage actors. Her grandparents ran the Reading Repertory Theatre. Both her sisters are actors. Winslet was in advertisements as a child and was 13 when she began landing roles on TV. At 17 she made her debut in the film Heavenly Creatures. Winslet has starred in such films as Sense And Sensibility, Jude, Hamlet, Hideous Kinky, Titanic, Iris, Quills, Life Of David Gale, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Finding Neverland, among many others.

She is hugely successful, far more so than anyone else in her family. "I do struggle with that emotionally, like, why me and not them? My dad doesn't really act anymore, he's slowing down a bit and just enjoying life, but both my sisters act, and the great thing is they're almost always working. My older sister does a lot of theatre, my younger sister has just been cast in two independent movies. I have tremendous pride for both of them, because they are absolutely great." Her one brother, she says, "wouldn't go near acting with a barge pole."

Saying she fears she'll sound "like a cracked record," Winslet talks at length about young girls and body image in contemporary society -- a subject dear to her heart. "More than ever now, I believe it's so important to look as real and true to life as possible, because nobody's perfect. I seem to be on a mission, but I don't want the next generation, your daughters and mine, growing up thinking that you have to be thin to look beautiful in certain clothes. It's terrifying right now. It's out of control. It's beyond out of control."

She is disgusted by celebrity magazines that put photos of undernourished stars on their covers, "And then express faux concern for them. If you're really that concerned, don't do it. Don't put those pictures where young girls will see them."

Winslet has accepted the fact that being an actress makes her a role model for young women. "For a long time that seemed like a huge responsibility, but if I am that to some young women, then that's great. I'm tremendously flattered to be looked up to in that way, and I feel an enormous responsibility to stay normal and true to myself and not conform and all those things. You know? To be healthy. And normal. And to like to eat cake."