The 50-year-old star has spoken frankly about her troubled childhood – when school classmates were ‘bloody horrible’ to her, locking her in cupboards and mocking her weight
Kate Winslet appeared on Desert Island Discs to talk about her life(Image: Getty Images)
Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet has revealed how cruel taunts from classmates, and even teachers, drove her into developing a serious health issue. She said that because she wasn’t as slim as some of the other girl in her acting class she had been poorly treated by drama school staff, which sparked an eating disorder.
She explained on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: “I really remember vividly a drama teacher who many people have wrongly assumed was a man – it was actually a woman – and she said to me, ‘Well darling, you’ll have a career if you’re happy to settle for the fat girl parts’.”
She added that she was “on and off diets from the age of 15 to 19.” Eventually, Kate said she was hardly eating at all: “It was really unhealthy,” she said.
Kate told the show’s host, Lauren Laverne: “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.”
She had a powerful message for her former classmates: “You lot who were in my year at school, you were bloody horrible to me, and you should be ashamed.”
Kate says she was taunted about her weight as a young woman(Image: Getty Images)
Kate recalled that the bullying dated back to her primary school days: “I had a lot of kids tease me at primary school. 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.’
The multi-BAFTA award-winner recalled how, after she won her first starring rôle at the age of 15, the other girls at her school became even more envious of her talent: “They hated me then. I remember going back to school and they had pushed my desk into a corner and moved their desks to the other side of the room.”
She has now moved into directing and producing (Image: Getty Images)
She said she learned to have “a pretty thick skin” and threw herself into her drama studies: “The school mean people became as insignificant as I could possibly make them,” Kate explained. “I wouldn’t let them spoil a trajectory that I was determined I was on.”
The trajectory that Kate was on has led her to become one of the most respected and admired actresses of her generation. The 50-year-old star’s impressive range has taken in the irrepressible Rose in Titanic, teenage murderess Juliet Hulme in Heavenly Creatures and a former Nazi camp guard in The Reader – the rôle for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2008.
This year she made her directorial debut with the Netflix drama film Goodbye June, which she also produced and starred in.
She has been outspoken about the way that Hollywood drives performers – and particularly female performers – to undergo cosmetic surgery to keep getting rôles: “I want to play characters who have wrinkles and crow’s feet and a face that is changing with age and a body that is moving with the passing decades,” she said. “That’s life.”