Kate Winslet complains her new film did nothing for her waistline

Kate Winslet lived the life of pie!

Kate Winslet is worried people will get the wrong idea about her from new film Labor Day.

“I’m fabulous at cooking, it’s all acting,” she stressed to me. “I had to be a little hands off which, for someone who can be controlling in the kitchen, was a bit of a challenge.”

In the movie, Kate plays Adele, a reclusive single mother who, along with her 13-year-old son, is taken hostage by an escaped convict (Josh Brolin) on the eve of America’s Labor Day weekend (a Bank Holiday which falls on the first weekend of September).

Psychologically damaged by her husband running off with another woman, agoraphobic Adele is brought out of her shell by having a man about the house and mother and son end up hiding him from the authorities.

It helps that he’s a dab hand in the kitchen (and, in Adele’s case, a lot else besides).

“I have to hand it to Josh, he really did want to make sure he was good at pie making, and he was,” laughs Kate at the memory of the improbable source of catering on set. “He baked at least five pies a week throughout the entire shoot.

“He’d get up really early and bake at five in the morning, and bring them to work.

“So every day, on the table, there was another one of Josh’s pies.”

The film is based on a book by Joyce Maynard, herself a single mother in her younger days, and inspired by her own experience of striking up a lengthy correspondence with a convicted double

murderer.

“I don’t know whether I am specifically drawn to unexpected love stories,” says Kate, who has twice earned Oscar recognition for her portrayal of romances in Titanic and The Reader.

“One thing I did feel strongly is that I really believed in the relationship.

“On the surface, Adele appears very weak and tormented but I admired her strength and thought it was an important part of her because we all have the aptitude to be both those things.

“The story itself is really beautiful and pure and I was very much drawn to that and how these two people, against all odds, meet and are thrown together in ways that change both their lives.

“There’s something very powerful about that to me.”

The 38-year-old star is promoting her movie just three months after giving birth to her third child, son Bear, her first with new husband Ned Rocknroll (a nephew of Richard Branson).

Tomorrow evening she will attend a ceremony in Los Angeles to mark the unveiling of a star in her honour on Hollywood Boulevard and then it will be back to Britain to attend the premiere of her next movie, science-fiction adventure Divergent.

Having a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son from her two previous marriages helped Kate bond with the young actor playing her son in the film, teenager Gattlin Griffith who previously played Angelina Jolie’s abducted child in Changeling.

“I knew I had to be his friend and I wanted to be,” says Kate of building a believable mother-son relationship.

“He was my priority on set and it was a privilege to spend that amount of time with someone at that age, he is at the most gorgeous age for any boy or girl, every day he had a squillion questions and didn’t know how to ask them.

“It was one of the most wonderful working relationships that I have ever had.”

Labor Day is at cinemas from Friday.