Kate Winslet appeared in an interview with the Los Angeles Times alongside the likes of Andra Day, Michelle Pfieffer, Vanessa Kirby and Rashida Jones where she opened up about being overweight following Titanic’s success.
Kirby asked the 45-year-old, “Kate, can I ask what it was like being so young in Titanic? Did it like blow your mind after it came out and you realised that that many people were watching you in the cinema? Did you know at the time when you were making it?”
To which Winslet replied, “I didn’t. I was playing an American for the first time and working with Leo, who I'd seen in Gilbert Grape and Basketball Diaries. So it was like, 'Oh, my God, I'm Kate from Reading.' I was the overweight girl who would always be at the end of the line. And because my name was a W, sometimes I wouldn't even get in the door of the audition because they'd run out of time before the Ws. And I was in Titanic. It's mad”.
The mother-of-three said, “The honest answer is I was scared of Hollywood. A big, scary place, where everyone had to be thin and look a certain way. And I knew that I did not look that way or feel like I fit there, so if I was ever going to belong, I had to earn my place”.
The actress further confessed that after becoming a mother her perspective about her career changed.
She shared, “When I became a mother at 25, all of that stuff evaporated completely. Then two years after she was born, I was asked to do Eternal Sunshine [of the Spotless Mind]. I do believe that was a huge turning point in my career, because from then on people suddenly went, 'Oh, she can do that?!’”
Previously Winslet told in an interview about feeling bullied, she said, “I felt quite bullied, if I'm honest. I remember just thinking, 'Okay, well, this is horrible and I hope it passes.' And it did definitely pass but it also made me realise that if that's what being famous was, I was not ready to be famous, thank you, no, definitely not”.
