She was only 22 years old when Kate Winslet rose to world fame thanks to the success of Titanic (1997). A popularity of hers that far from fascinating her showed her a face that she now confesses she would rather not have known. “Honestly, I felt intimidated,” reflects the actress, who is 45, on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, where she recalls how the media, especially the British tabloids, were nasty to her. “I immediately went into self-defense mode because day and night, every day, I was subjected to enormous personal and physical scrutiny. I got criticized quite a bit, the British press was actually quite cruel to me,” she comments.
"I remember thinking: 'this is horrible and I hope it passes'. And it really did happen, but it made me realize that if it meant being famous, I wasn't ready for it. Definitely not ”, explains the actress, who did not want to take advantage of the popularity that the tape gave her where she shared the limelight with Leonardo DiCaprio and decided to get away from Hollywood for a while. “I was still learning to act and felt like I wasn't ready to do a lot of big work in Hollywood,” admits Winslet, who had entered the profession only a few years earlier, at 17. “I didn't want to make mistakes and mess it up, I wanted to continue acting. in this for the long term. So I tried to find little roles so that I could understand the craft a little better, understand myself a little better, and maintain some level of privacy and dignity,” she adds.
Three years after Titanic, the actress had her first daughter, Mia, with her first husband, director Jim Threapleton. Winslet says that with her motherhood the interest of the press in her diminished and she also believes that she was less aware of the media attention because she decided to focus on raising her child. "All that evaporated a bit," says she, who is now the mother of three children from three marriages. After Threapleton (1998-2001), Winslet was with Sam Mendes (2003-2011), from whose union Joe, 17, was born, and since 2012 she has shared her life with her third husband, Ned Rocknroll, nephew of millionaire Richard Branson and father of Bear, eight years old.
It wasn't the first time that Winslet felt harassed by her physique. As she has recounted on several occasions, as a child she was overweight and suffered bullying at school. Her classmates made fun of her desire to be an actress and came to lock her in a closet. And at only 14 years old, a drama teacher assured her that she would only receive fat roles. “Any young woman who has ever been discriminated against by a teacher, a friend or even a parent should not listen to it. That's what I did, ignore it and move on. I overcame all my fears and insecurities. You just have to keep believing in yourself, ”said the interpreter forcefully after collecting her Bafta award in 2016 for her performance in the film Steve Jobs.
In the 23 years since the release of Titanic, Winslet has racked up credits in big movies as well as more independent ones, playing roles in a variety of genres. After receiving her first two Oscar nominations for Sense and Sensibility and Titanic, she earned another five for Iris, Forget Me!, Intimate Secrets, Steve Jobs and The Reader, finally winning the statuette with the latter title. Now she is preparing the second part of Avatar, scheduled for 2022 and where she works again with James Cameron, the filmmaker who catapulted her to fame, while she is once again one of the favorites in the Oscar race for Ammonite, where she stars in a lesbian love story with Saoirse Ronan.
