FilmMagic via Getty ImagesKate Winslet has spoken about how she coped with “appalling” reporting and intrusion by the media after rising to fame as Rose in James Cameron’s 1997 epic, Titanic.
The actor and director said she was followed by paparazzi and had her phone tapped, with people even looking through her bins and asking her local shops what she bought to “try to figure out what diet I was on or wasn’t on.”
“It was horrific,” she said. Years later, she experienced further intrusion during a marriage breakdown, adding that the ways she dealt with the media attention were “a good meal, a shared conversation, a nice cup of coffee, a bit of Radiohead and a good poo”.
“You know, life’s all the better for those things,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
Winslet wasn’t in a “particularly good shape”
While filming Titanic in her early 20s, Winslet wasn’t in a “particularly good shape” mentally around her body, she said.
Despite the incredible experience of making the film, she described her world as “totally turned upside down” once it hit cinemas.
She said, “I wasn’t prepared for that world.”
She said she had received negative comments about her appearance from a young age, recalling being nicknamed “blubber” by her peers at primary school as a child and later being told she would have to “settle for the fat girl parts” if she wanted to be an actor by a drama teacher.
Between the ages of 15 and 19, she admitted to intermittent dieting, describing herself as “barely eating” by the end.
“It was really unhealthy,” she said.
Once Titanic was released, she began to see herself on the cover of newspapers and magazines, often accompanied by what she described as “awful, terrible, actually abusive names”.
“It was horrific. There were people tapping my phone. They were just everywhere. And I was just on my own. I was terrified to go to sleep,” she said.
Support from friends and those close to her was part of how she dealt with it then – including from a neighbouring couple who would leave her a “bowl of steaming pasta and a little glass of red wine” on the garden wall between their houses.
CBS Photo Archive via Getty ImagesSpeaking further about her depiction in the media at that time, Winslet described how magazine cover images of her were edited without her knowledge – something she also famously spoke out about in the early 2000s.
Speaking to Lauren Laverne, Winslet recalled looking at those types of images and thinking, “I don’t look like this. My stomach isn’t flat like that. My legs are not that long; my boobs are not that big. What? My arms aren’t that toned. What the hell?”
“I didn’t want any young woman, even just one, to look at that image and think, ‘Oh my God, I want to look like that.’ That’s not me,” she said.
Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic via Getty ImagesWinslet also talked about the headlines that were printed after it emerged she was about to divorce her second husband, film director Sam Mendes, in 2010.
“I was being followed by paparazzi in New York City with my two small kids, who wanted to, of course, know the reason why Sam and I had split up,” she said.
Asked how she dealt with that at the time, Winslet said, “You just keep your mouth closed, you put your head down, and you keep walking. And you try and put your hands over your children’s ears. You lean on your friends; you just keep going.”
Getty ImagesLooking towards the present day, Winslet said that while the pressures of being a woman in the film industry may have changed with time, there is “so much we still have to unlearn […] about how we speak to women in film.”
As she makes her directorial debut with the film Goodbye June, written by her son, Joe Anders, she said she had heard several things that “would never be said” to a male director.
“So they might say things like, ‘Don’t forget to be confident in your choices.’
“And I want to sort of say, ‘Don’t talk to me about confidence,’ because if there’s one thing I haven’t ever lacked, actually, it’s exactly that. That person wouldn’t say that to a man.”
Her reaction to it now?
“Shut up,” she said with a laugh.
