4. She paid her way through drama school one voiceover at a time
Kate attended Redroofs School for the Performing Arts in Maidenhead, but there was no guarantee she would be able to stay. Her mum made it clear: “You’ve got to get more voiceovers because next term, we just won’t be able to pay for it.”
Kate Winslet in the Desert Island Discs Studio.
They started calling me awful, terrible, actually abusive names… going through my bins to look for my shopping receipts, to figure out what diet I was on or wasn’t on
Kate Winslet on being targeted by the British tabloids
She took the challenge seriously. “Luckily I was really good at accents.” she explains. One company kept calling her back for dubbing work. “That would be £60 or £65 a day, which was a lot of money when you were 11. And that would go straight into the school fees pot.”
5. She landed her breakout film role mid-sandwich
It was while working behind a deli counter in Reading that the call came through saying she’d got the lead role in Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. “I was in the middle of making a sandwich. Chris, the manager, stuck his head out the door and said, ‘Kate, phone for you.’”
It was her child agent. “She just said, ‘Who’s a clever girl then?’ I remember running home in the rain and telling everybody. None of us could believe it. And it really was the beginning of everything.”
6. She was bullied and body-shamed at school – and then by the press
Kate was locked in the art cupboard and teased about her weight as a child. “You lot who were in my year at school, you were bloody horrible to me,” she says bluntly, “and you should be ashamed of yourselves!”
When her breakout role as Rose in Titanic in 1997 made her one of the most recognisable faces in the world, she says she wasn’t ready. “My whole world was totally turned upside down. I have so much to be grateful for. But I wasn’t in a particularly good place around my physical self at all.”
She was targeted again, this time by the British tabloids. “They started calling me awful, terrible, actually abusive names… going through my bins to look for my shopping receipts, to figure out what diet I was on or wasn’t on,” she recalls. “It was an utter disgrace. And thank God they don’t do that now.”
7. A white lie helped her land one of her most famous film roles
After her debut in Heavenly Creatures, Winslet was invited to audition for Sense and Sensibility, but not for the role she wanted. So, she and her agent had an idea.
“My agent said, ‘ They want to meet you for the character of Lucy Steele. Between you and I, we should cook up a plan where you’re going to go in and pretend that you didn’t get the memo, and you’re going to prepare two or three scenes to read for the Marianne part. You’re going to go in there and smash it.’ So that’s what I did.”