Berlin  - Playing love scenes is never easy, Oscar-nominated actress Kate Winslet told a Berlin Film Festival press conference Friday.

"It is not something one particularly enjoys," said the 33-year-old British actress, but she said "sometimes it is part of the job. I just get on with it."

Winslet was speaking following the screening at the Berlin Film Festival of The Reader in which she plays Hanna Schmitz, an older woman who has a passionate affair with a teenager, Michael Berg in Germany during the late 1950s.

The relationship between Hanna and Michael, played by 18-year-old German actor David Kross, blossoms after Michael begins reading her books after he discovers she is illiterate.

However, Hanna has another darker secret. She suddenly disappears only to resurface years later as part of a war crimes trial resulting from her role as a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Based on a 1995 novel by German law professor-turned author Bernhard Schlink, The Reader has been nominated for five oscar nominations, including for best picture.

The 33-year-old Winslet, who has been nominated for an Oscar as best actress for her role as Hanna in the film, said after she read the novel she believed The Reader was also about a love story.

"It's a love story which has an impact on the rest of their lives," said Winslet adding that the love scenes were "a very important part of this love story."

The film's director, British-born Stephan Daldry, who also directed The Hours and Billy Elliot, said that unlike most movies about the Nazi period The Reader was concerned with the perpetrators of the crimes committed during the Third Reich rather than the victims.

"This is a movie about post-war Germany," Daldry said and how the post-war generation of Germans dealt with the darker side of their nation's history.

The Reader also starred British actor Ralph Fiennes who plays the older Michael Berg. British writer David Hare wrote the film's screenplay.

Winslet has already won Golden Globes for her performance in The Reader as well as Revolutionary Road, a story about American suburbia in the 1950's.

As a character, Winslet said it was difficult to balance the shame and guilt that Hanna felt because of her illiteracy and her life during the Nazi era.

"I tried to make her a human being as well as showing her vulnerability and shame," she said. dpa