I am a sucker for Kate Winslet. Not only is she a beautiful woman (and my longest-lasting crush, going on 14 years) but she is also one of cinema’s most talented actresses. The youngest person to acquire six Oscar nominations, she finally won the Best Actress statuette for her heartbreaking performance in “The Reader.” She hasn’t been on the big screen since 2008 and won’t be there until later this year in Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion.” Until then, she is gracing the small screen (which may not be too small after all, considering how big flat-screens are these days) in the HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce.”Winslet is the titular character, a housewife in Depression-era Southern California who is trying to make ends meet after her husband leaves her and their two young daughters, Veda and Ray. Her pie-making business has dried up. She has to resort to waitressing at a diner in Hollywood. Soon she begins to sell pies to the owner and her pies are popular with the customers. She receives contracts from other restaurateurs and decides to open her own restaurant, a chicken and waffle house in a realty office once co-owned by her ex-husband.

Along the way she meets Monty Beragon (Guy Pierce), a man from the upper class, who offers her and Veda an opportunity to enter into his world. Ray is unable to enjoy her mother’s newfound success; she dies from pneumonia shortly before Mildred’s first restaurant opens. We are left with Veda, who is portrayed by Morgan Turner as a child and Evan Rachel Wood as an adult.

Wood doesn’t appear until Part Three (which premieres this week) but Turner shows how vicious Veda can be at around age ten. In one scene, she discovers Mildred’s waitress costume and orders their housekeeper to wear the dress and address her and Ray as “missus.” When Mildred finally spanks her after an intense confrontation, you would assume that Veda figures out that she cannot be as cruel as she wants to be, but the spanking doesn’t knock any sense into her. She will only get worse as she grows up.

All the blame can’t go to Veda, it’s mostly Mildred’s fault for raising her to be a brat. Mildred doesn’t want to only put bread on the table. “I want them to have cake,” she tells her friend Lucy, (a worldly Melissa Leo with a great 1930s Californian accent,) “all the cake in the world.”

It’s tough sympathizing with a character like Mildred Pierce, especially if you are familiar with the story. This tragedy is based on James M. Cain’s 1941 best-selling novel, which was adapted into the screen four years later, starring Joan Crawford in an Oscar-winning performance.

“Mildred Pierce” is a chilling dispatch on contemporary American society. Mothers and fathers tell their children that they are special and should expect the five-star treatment wherever they go and don’t accept anything less. Then the children grow up and believe they can have all the cake they want and eat it too.

Winslet doesn’t do conventional roles, which is why Mildred Pierce is a great role for her. Just watching her do the little things, like trying to see if she can afford a package of hot dogs for dinner, clean up tables at the diner, or make a pie for a client, is entertaining.

This is an actress who made audiences empathize with a guard at a death camp, an unhappy mother who sees her pregnancy as a burden and an unhinged free-spirit who made funnyman Jim Carrey go through an ordeal of misery and unhappiness (both during and after their relationship.) Like those roles on celluloid, she is a tour-de-force on television.