Kate Winslet won’t forget what some adults had to say about her body at a young age.
“I was a little bit stocky. When I did start taking [acting] much more seriously and got a child agent, I really remember vividly a drama teacher,” Winslet, 50, shared in a sneak peek of the Friday, December 26 episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, per multiple outlets. “She said to me, ‘Well, darling, you’ll have a career if you’re ready to settle for the fat girl parts.’”
After landing roles in Titanic, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and countless other films, the Oscar winner has a message for the drama teacher.
“Look at me now,” she said. “It’s appalling the things people say to children.”
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Winslet revealed that she was on and off diets from the age of 15 to 19, adding that “eventually I was barely eating.”
“It was really unhealthy,” she continued. “It’s the only thing in my life I really regret because you know, long-term, not eating properly or eating and panicking about what you’d eaten or waking up in the morning and the first thing I’d think about is, ‘Oh my God, do I look fatter, do I look fatter?’ That went on for a really long time.”
After all these years, Winslet also remembers the words of some of her classmates who made jokes about her appearance.
“I had a lot of kids tease me at primary school,” she revealed. “They would call me blubber. I wasn’t even overweight. I just had stocky thighs, and they would lock me in the art cupboard, and they would say, ‘Blubber’s blubbing in the art cupboard’ and things like that.”
Although Winslet is confident in who she is and how she looks today, she may just spark a conversation about how people speak to women.
During her experiences in Hollywood, the actress said she was told things as a first-time director that she isn’t sure would be expressed to a man in the same position.
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“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 that’s one thing I haven’t ever lacked, actually, it’s exactly that,” she said. “That person wouldn’t say that to a man.”
Winslet will make her directorial debut in the upcoming movie Goodbye June. The film, which begins streaming on Netflix Wednesday, December 24, follows a group of fractured siblings who must come together under sudden and trying circumstances.
“I know it sounds a bit like sickly, but we had to really become a family in order to make it feel as real as possible and as relatable as possible,” Winslet told ScreenRant in an interview published Sunday, December 21, about her cast that includes Helen Mirren, Timothy Spall and Johnny Flynn. “You can’t just show up and do the job and go home again, it becomes something else. We were lucky on this film that that really happened.”
