Once told she looked “melted and poured” into a red carpet gown, the Oscar winner asks, “What kind of a person must they be to do something like that to a young actress who’s just trying to figure it out?”
Kate Winslet spent her formative years as a young actress both dominating at the box office for her star turn in Titanic, and dealing with unbelievably awful things said to her about her body.
Sitting down with 60 Minutes on Sunday, the Oscar winner talked about confronting the abuse head-one, sharing one brutal moment when an interviewer said it looked as if she’d been “melted and poured” into a red carpet gown.
But Winslet said it started even before that, when a drama teacher once told her she would have to settle for the “fat girl” parts. From that moment, the actress opted instead to fight back against this push.
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Hindsight has also afforded her a greater clarity about herself, with Winslet emphasizing, “I was never even fat!”
“It made me think, I’ll just show you,” she said. “Just quietly. It was like, sort of a quiet determination, really.”
But she didn’t stay quiet, as the noise about her figure got louder and louder as Titanic became the first film to break a billion dollars at the box office in 1997. It featured a brief nude scene for Winslet, which only added to the unsolicited commentary.
“It was absolutely appalling,” said Winslet of hearing comments like the one above. “What kind of a person must they be to do something like that to a young actress who’s just trying to figure it out?”
And that’s why she decided to stand up for herself and “for all those people who were subjected to that level of harassment.”
Calling the commonplace vitriol flung at women at the time “horrific,” Winslet said she stopped being quiet. “I let them have it,” she told 60 Minutes, after being asked if she ever got “face to face” with anyone who criticized her body. “I said, ‘I hope this haunts you.’ It was a great moment. It was a great moment, because it wasn’t just for me.”
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And while things have begun to improve for women in Hollywood — an industry that used to unofficially age many of them out at 40 — Winslet notes that she’s so tired of being called “brave” for just being.
“People say, ‘Oh, you were so brave for this role. You didn’t wear any makeup.’ You know, ‘You had wrinkles,'” said the 49-year-old. “we say to the men, ‘Oh, you were so brave for this role. You grew a beard?’ No. We don’t.'”
This isn’t even the first time Kate Winslet has called out boorish comments about women’s bodies this year. In August, she spoke up about a crew member coming up to her between takes while filming World War II drama Lee to weigh in.
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“There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini,” Winslet told Harper’s Bazaar UK. “And one of the crew came up between takes and said: ‘You might want to sit up straighter.'”
“So you can’t see my belly rolls?” Winslet says she shot back. “Not on your life! It was deliberate, you know?”
Winslet has been fighting for women’s rights to be their authentic selves and look their authentic selves — like pushing back against Photoshopping their bodies for magazine covers — for years.
While there’s work yet to be done on this front, she told the magazine she feels “a huge sense of relief that women are so much more accepting of themselves and refusing to be judged.”
For her part, Winslet told 60 Minutes she’s developed an armor she brings into her work and has reached a point in her life where she’s realized it’s “exhausting” to do things like sit up straighter to try and create this ideal that isn’t really anyway.
