It has been a rum old month for Winslet. Two weeks ago she couldn't nip out of the flat she shared with her Oscar-nominated sister Kate for a pint of milk without the paparazzi baying at her heel, and now here she is being slung out of a swanky hotel. But that, as if Beth Winslet didn't already know is showbiz.

At 19, Winslet, who makes her screen debut in this weekend's BBC adaptation of Minette Walters's The Scold's Bridle, is amused to find herself a scion of Britain's newest theatrical "dynasty". True, her maternal grandparents set up a theatre company at the bottom of their garden. Her father, Rodger Winslet, is an actor, as is her eldest sister, Anna 25.

But it was the promotion of Titanic star Kate Winslet, 22, to Hollywood's A-list that put the Winslet's of Reading up there with the Redgraves and the Cusacks. It is all, as Winslet points out, "a bit of a joke".

For some family members the joke has worn thin. "We're all utterly sick of the attention Kate's career has bought," Winslet mere told the London Evening Standard recently, and it has been reported that Anna, an excellent if relatively unknown actor, is so traumatized by comparison with her younger sister that she has considered changing her name. Beth however is too smart- or too nice- to show any sisterly solidarity. "My family are great," she says stoutly. "They've had to put up with all these people phoning and hassling them 24 hours a day for quotes about Kate, and they just get on and deal with it in their own way. Personally, I don't mind talking about Kate because I'm so bloody proud of her."

Having a famous sibling is a mixed blessing for an actor, Certainly, it entitles you to have a free ride on the publicity machine, but this can backfire nastily on the untalented. " I'm not going to be cast in anything because I have a famous sister. No one would take that kind of a risk with a production". say's Winslet.

Her assurance is borne out by a copper-bottomed performance in The Scold's Bridle. Which starts tomorrow. As the mixed-up daughter of a junkie mother ( played with surprising panache by Trudie"mrs Sting" Styler), Winslet virtually sweats damage. In a plot that embraces masochism, child abuse and gang rape, there is a good deal of crying to be done, and Winslet could weep for England. She is not of the hankie dabbing school, but goes in rather for the full, retching, tears-dripping-off-the-nose sob.

"There's a scene where my character is crying with relief and happiness and that's much harder to do than crying when something terrible has happened," she notes. Kate has cornered the corseted ingenues, Winslet promises something more complex. Tall athletic with wide blue eyes in a strong looking face, she can do forceful one moment and vulnerable the next. Occasionally, she does them both together.

" I don't have a technique as such" she says. "I didn't go to drama school, so I don't have a fixed ideal of how an actor should be. I think I'm a bit like a piece of dough. I will go on a job and the director can manipulate me any way he likes. At the end of it all, I'll just kind of squash myself down and the next person can do the same. I hope I can carry on doing that all the way throughout my career".

"I'd like to do some theatre," she continues,"but that's where drama school really comes in handy, with voice-training and verse-speaking and all that kind of thing. It's not that I have anything against drama school, I just feel that in my case maybe drama school would have taken away from rather than added to me."

It was the same mixture of instinct, self analysis and unaffected confidence that led Winslet to leave her Reading comprehensive halfway through her A-levels. "A friend of mine who directed me in an amateur production [Winslet's admittedly scant CV includes playing a lead , aged 12, in an am-dram production of Annie opposite Kate's Miss Hannigan] happened to know a film producer and put me up for an audition. As soon as I knew I had the part, I thought 'I'd best get myself an agent'."

" Then to the horror of everyone around me, I dropped out of school. I just had this incredible feeling that this was something I really had to do. Before the film got off the ground I was offered a part in The Scold's Bridle and the role of Juliet in the National Youth Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. In the end, I thought , 'Well Shakespeare isn't going anywhere, but The Scold's Bridle is only going to happen once and with a cast like that [it includes Maranda Richardson, Sian Phillips, Bob Peck and Douglas Hodge],  I just couldn't turn it down."

Flung into the deep end, Beth relies heavily on the support of her family, including Kate. "It's not so much work advice as life advice," she explains. "How to keep my feet on the ground and not to get too swept up by early success and" she says, shooting a look of pure sweetness, "not to believe anything written about me in the papers because it probably won't be true."

Much as she admires her sister, Beth Winslet shows no ambition to follow Kate to Hollywood. She flicks her hair at the idea." Crinklewood is more my style," she says firmly. But only a fool would believe her.