Kate: I don’t care about wrinkles
...but resented being called ‘curvy’ when I was a size six!
KATE Winslet says she is proud of her “wrinkles and crunkles”, joking: “When you’re a woman, at a certain point you have to choose between your a*** and your face.”
But the 45-year-old Titanic actress also revealed that she resented being labelled “curvy Kate” in her 20s when she was anything but.
She said: “People would talk about me like I was different, because I was slightly bigger than average.
“I was a size six.”
But she added: “I like carbs – what’s wrong with that?”
Attempts to defend herself, she says, saw her labelled as “ballsy”, though she believes Hollywood celebrates real women better now, and there is less “judging” within the industry as there was in the 1990s when she rocketed to fame.
She says: “That’s one area I would say we are doing globally a little better.
“Hollywood was completely riddled with very, very slender women in a way that was not entirely balanced or perhaps quite right.
“That’s gone a bit now.”
But she adds: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”Now, as the thrice married mum of three celebrates looking natural as a palaeontologist in new film Ammonite, she says: “I feel very proud of my 45-year-old self.
“I’ve had three children, I am who I am, this is a different physical me to the one I was in my early 20s.
“The way my face is now – the wrinkles and crunkles that exist on my face – I’m proud of those things.
“The age in the backs of my hands that have loved and lost and cared.
“I really value and appreciate being able to show all of those things without censorship and without hesitation.
“Maybe I’m confident enough to do that now, whereas I definitely wouldn’t have been when I was younger.”
Speaking to the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast, Kate credits starring in the 2011 film Contagion with helping to prep her for the pandemic.
She started wearing a mask as soon as the first cases were announced.
She said: “Right away I was like: ‘It’s coming, people.’”
People at the time looked at her “quite strange”, she says.
However, she admits she spent filming that movie worrying if her bum looked big in a body bag.
“I did have quite a lot of fun, because I got slung into a ditch in a body bag,” she recalls.
“Almost every take, I’d open one eye and say: ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ Or, ‘Do I look thin?’
“Stupid, typically vain, nonsense, c***.”
Kate now plans to work with her 20-year-old daughter Mia in a project where she hints the budding actress could play her daughter.
Kate says: “She’s really good – a lot better than I was at her age.
“She’s grounded and very unafraid. I feel I was much more afraid and tentative at her age.”
During lockdown, Kate admits she and her husband – Richard Branson’s nephew Edward Abel Smith, 43, who previously called himself Ned Rocknroll because he thought his name was boring – had “dumb, lockdown grumps”.
These tended to be about who had secretly eaten missing food from the fridge and who was supposed to feed the dog, she said.