Kate Winslet sat down with ET this week in New York City during promotion for her new film, The Reader.

Kate tells ET that shooting the film “took me to the brink in many ways.” For the nude scenes in the movie, Kate says she refused to work out because, “It was important to me to look real. I really don’t believe in this notion that actors and actresses should look untouchably perfect.”

In the film, Kate ages 35 years thanks to make-up and padding, “It was exhausting. It took seven hours to put on every day and the body suit weighs about 15 pounds.”

A haunting story about horrific war crimes, truth and reconciliation, The Reader stars Kate as Hanna, a woman in post-WWII Germany who plunges into a passionate and secretive affair with a younger man named Michael Berg (David Kross) and then suddenly disappears. Several years later, Michael, now a law student, sits in on the Nazi war crime trials, only to find Hanna forced to defend herself in the courtroom.

“It is a love story; it’s not a Holocaust movie,” says Kate. “It’s about these two people falling in love and needing each other in ways that really surprise them both.”

As for the fact that she’s 15 years older than her 18-year-old co-star, she says that their love scenes were nothing but professional. “It was the same as shooting any other scene of that nature,” she explains. “A scene with that level of intimacy involving nudity, you know, it’s always nerve-wracking, and you really have to rehearse those scenes so that everybody knows exactly what’s going on. He (David) didn’t need that much looking after.”

The Reader opens December 10th.

Here are some pictures of Kate in The Reader.  And if you’re interested, here’s the trailer!

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WOW! She looks amazing!

See the trailer for this movie here!  It’s going to give you goosebumps!

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Just a day after Kate Winslet revealed in a Vanity Fair interview that she still feels like the “fat kid,” critics in her home country are lining up to claim she still is.

But the svelte Oscar-winner isn’t having it: “Kate is furious at suggestions that her body has been airbrushed,” her rep tells PEOPLE exclusively.

The Sun ponders on its front page whether “that magic airbrush has been at work again” and the Daily Telegraph got a digital retouching expert to analyze the photos. But the closest scrutiny comes from the Daily Mail, which engaged a professional airbrush artist to perform an autopsy on Winslet, who was shot wearing heels, black stockings and nothing else.

“She is in terrific shape and what you see is how she looks or she would never have agreed to pose for those shots,” adds her rep.

Why the British furor over the 33-year-old mom-of-two? In early 2003 Britain’s GQ magazine – a stablemate of Vanity Fair – ran digitally “slimmed” photos of Winslet that drew much criticism. Within days Winslet apologized.

“I just didn’t want people to think I was a hypocrite and that I’d suddenly lost 30 lbs. or whatever,” the youngest ever five-time Oscar nominee said at the time. “So I just came out and said, ‘Look, I don’t look like that’. I’m not mad at the magazine, but I have no intention of looking like that.”

Winslet’s rep does admit that minor tweaks were done to the actress for the photoshoot but insists the work was confined to skin shades only.

“The only retouching was the usual work on skin tone that happens in every glamour shoot,” adds the rep.

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Kate Winslet says she didn’t always want to be famous.

“I was fat. I didn’t know any fat famous actresses,” she tells December’s Vanity Fair. “I just did not see myself in that world at all, and I’m being very sincere.

“You know, once a fat kid, always a fat kid,” she adds. “Because you always think that you just look a little bit wrong or a little bit different from everyone else. And I still sort of have that.”

But she says she looks at “women who wear great jeans and high heels and nice little T-shirts wandering around the city and I think, ‘I should make more of an effort. I should look like that,’” she says. “But then I think, ‘They can’t be happy in those heels.’”

Winslet has become a hero to fans for refusing to bow to Hollywood pressure to be skinny. (In 2007, she won libel damages after Britain’s Grazia magazine falsely reported that she used a diet doctor.)

Still, she says, “everyone can commit to 20 minutes” of working out, “especially if there’s a glass of Chardonnay afterwards.”

Above all, the actress wants fans to know she’s just like them – zits and all.

When she walks her children (Mia, 8, and Joe, 5) to school, she says, “Some [parents] will even say to me, ‘O.K., what’s the secret with the skin?’ At which point I’m like, ‘Oh my God, there’s no secret. I have makeup on.’

“And by the way, since I turned 30, I’ve had an acne problem on my chin,” adds the actress. “I’m just like everybody else — I just know how to cover it. If you’d like me to show you how, I’d be more than happy.”

She says she is lucky she’s wed to Sam Mendes, who directs her and Leonardo DiCaprio in the December drama Revolutionary Road.

“I need to be looked after,” she tells the magazine. “I’m not talking about diamond rings and nice restaurants and fancy stuff – in fact, that makes me uncomfortable. I didn’t grow up with it, and it’s not me, you know?

“But I need someone to say to me, ‘Shall I run you a bath?’ or ‘Let’s go to the pub, just us.’ I mean, the things that make me happiest in the whole world are going on the occasional picnic, either with my children or with my partner,” she says. “Big family gatherings, and being able to go to the grocery store — if I can get those things in, I’m doing good.”

What would really make her happy? Winning an Oscar.

“Do I want it? You bet your f–king ass I do!” admits Winslet, who’s been nominated five times. “I think that people assume that I don’t care or don’t want it or don’t need it or something. It’s hard to be there five times, and I’m only human, you know? But I don’t go home and cry, because we’re all grown-ups here.”

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PICTURES: Here are the first available stills from Kate’s new movie, “The Reader”.  See the amazing trailer here!

Gorgeous!

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