Kate Winslet has admitted she had a fight on her hands trying to squeeze her pregnant bosom into a corset for new film A Little Chaos.

The 39-year-old actress plays Sabine De Barra, a fictional landscape gardener commissioned to design an ornate rockery for King Louis XIV's elaborate gardens of Versailles in the period drama, directed by Alan Rickman.

Winslet said it was lovely to appear in an English period film after 10 years making movies in America, and insisted she even enjoyed being back in a corset, although it had been a bit of a struggle.

The Oscar-winning actress was pregnant with her son Bear, now 16 months old, at the time of shooting.

She laughed as she said: "All I can say is being pregnant and wearing a corset is hilarious - because there's nothing you can do about the boobs.

"There they are! And they just keep getting bigger, and you keep trying to squash them into... just into another place, because they don't even go down any more, you just try and find space under your armpits, anywhere. It really is hilarious.

"And the costumes have to keep being expanded. And I often had to just take things, literally, from extras because my own clothes wouldn't fit me any more. I'd say 'That apron, do you mind? I'm actually going to take that to be part of my costume today!'. It was really very funny."

In the film, Sabine finds the experience of attending court to meet King Louis XIV very difficult, as all eyes are on her.

But Winslet insisted she did not relate to this experience of being the subject of public scrutiny.

"I don't really feel like that any more," she said.

"I think it's sort of quietened down a lot now. I'm older now, my life is what it is, that's not as interesting to people as the kind of more tabloid, juicy stuff of one's twenties and so I don't necessarily feel watched.

"But also, I think as you get older, you learn to just really not care. It's funny, it's one of the great things about approaching 40, which I am later this year, goodness me! And when you've gone through childbirth as well, you really do learn to just exist within yourself, and not care what people say.

"So that's been quite liberating for me to come to that place in life, it's really nice."

Winslet, who will turn 40 in October, has been married to her third husband, Ned Rocknroll, since 2012. She has three children - 14-year-old daughter Mia from her first marriage to director Jim Threapleton, and 11-year-old son Joe from her marriage to director Sam Mendes.

A Little Chaos opens in cinemas on Friday.