![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/p0mpc85d.jpg\")
<\/p>\n4. She paid her way through drama school one voiceover at a time<\/p>\n
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: \u201cYou\u2019ve got to get more voiceovers because next term, we just won\u2019t be able to pay for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Kate Winslet in the Desert Island Discs Studio.\n <\/p>\n
They started calling me awful, terrible, actually abusive names\u2026 going through my bins to look for my shopping receipts, to figure out what diet I was on or wasn\u2019t on<\/p>\n
Kate Winslet on being targeted by the British tabloids<\/p>\n
She took the challenge seriously. \u201cLuckily I was really good at accents.\u201d she explains. One company kept calling her back for dubbing work. \u201cThat would be \u00a360 or \u00a365 a day, which was a lot of money when you were 11. And that would go straight into the school fees pot.\u201d<\/p>\n
5. She landed her breakout film role mid-sandwich<\/p>\n
It was while working behind a deli counter in Reading that the call came through saying she\u2019d got the lead role in Peter Jackson\u2019s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. \u201cI was in the middle of making a sandwich. Chris, the manager, stuck his head out the door and said, \u2018Kate, phone for you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
It was her child agent. \u201cShe just said, \u2018Who\u2019s a clever girl then?\u2019 \u200aI remember running home in the rain and telling everybody. None of us could believe it. And it really was the beginning of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
6. She was bullied and body-shamed at school \u2013 and then by the press<\/p>\n
Kate was locked in the art cupboard and teased about her weight as a child. \u201cYou lot who were in my year at school, you were bloody horrible to me,\u201d she says bluntly, \u201cand you should be ashamed of yourselves!\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t ready. \u201cMy whole world was totally turned upside down. I have so much to be grateful for. But I wasn\u2019t in a particularly good place around my physical self at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was targeted again, this time by the British tabloids. \u201cThey started calling me awful, terrible, actually abusive names\u2026 going through my bins to look for my shopping receipts, to figure out what diet I was on or wasn\u2019t on,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIt was an utter disgrace. And thank God they don\u2019t do that now.\u201d<\/p>\n
7. A white lie helped her land one of her most famous film roles<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy agent said, \u2018\u200aThey 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.\u2019 So that’s what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"4. She paid her way through drama school one voiceover at a time Kate attended Redroofs School for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-328089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}