Kate Talks About Weight

One of the aspects of Kate that I always identified with and found admirable is the fact that she has a very natural female body. That is, she is curvy (tall, too) and quite the opposite of the generic body type of most Hollywood stars and models and such. She's no tiny, cute little delicate waif, she has the body of an adult woman and doesn't look like she starves her figure into submission in order to fit some sort of ideal female beauty. Because of this, there has been discussion and commentary on Kate's atypical body and the way she seems to have no problem with it.

I'd be the first to say that Kate's amazing talents at acting are what the real focus should be on, and her beauty is certainly not all that makes Kate the goddess she is - I know the "Kate's weight" thread that was going on seemingly endlessly at alt.fan.kate-winslet annoyed many people, me included, who really don't give a damn what "size" Kate may be. However, I thought that I would like to mention this subject on my site simply because I do definitely admire the way Kate has spoken out and helped bust taboos somewhat on what a female film star "should" look like. Of course, Hollywood still has a very long way to go, and Kate is blessed, after all, with a stunning face and hair, but I do appreciate the way that many people have seen Kate in such films as "Titanic," where her curvy form is quite apparent, and have found her beautiful and *real*, and applauded what seems to be a step in the direction of acceptance of more realistic female bodies. And, since Kate has commented on this "non-issue" in quite a few interviews, I wanted to include her quotes to help promote that message. So, here goes! (And thanks to the folks on the newsgroup who posted some of these quotes, as well as the many others who rushed to defend Kate's natural beauty!)

Here's an article from "a local newspaper" (don't know the details yet) that someone contributed to the discussion:

At the Golden Globe Awards last weekend, everybody was talking about how Titanic star Kate Winslet is becoming somewhat titanic herself- she has put on a few pounds since the movie wrapped. There have been a number of bitchy little items in the press (and obviously in this newsgroup) about her weight, and now she has just shrugged off the whole issue:
"This is me, like it or lump it. The psychology had always been 'I'm fat and I have to be thinner.' [People think that] if a woman isn't rail-thin, then there must be something wrong with her- it's such nonsense."

And here's another:

"Life's so short and it's here to be lived," the 22-year-old star said on British television. "I'm happy with the way I am. I'm not like American film stars."

Last week Winslet was pictured in the press in a dress that failed to hide her fuller figure and accompanying words that suggested she was losing a battle over weight.

But she told GMTV television that she feels a lot happier after gaining 13 pounds since the end of shooting for the James Cameron film, in which she stars opposite Leonardo DiCaprio.

"Some people are naturally very slim. I'm naturally curvy," Winslet said. "I've got child-bearing hips."

In her early teenage years she ballooned in weight, then lost so much that she began having blackouts. That's when she decided to call it quits. And she urged other young women not to worry about their weight either.

"I feel my responsibility as a successful English actress is to say to all those young women who are out there in turmoil about their weight -- 'Life is short, and it's here to be lived'." (Well said, Kate!)

Kate had quite a bit to say on the subject in the March '98 Movieline magazine interview (by Stephen Rebello):

Winslet declares herself incensed by the attention young Hollywood women pay to weight and bust size. "At 19, I went from pillar to post about my body and spent at least 95 percent of my head-space every day thinking about what I bloody looked like," she says. "When I was making 'Sense and Sensibility', Emma Thompson noticed that I'd skip lunch and not eat properly. She said,'If you dare try and lose weight for this job, I will be furious with you.' She went out and bought me The Beauty Myth, and since then I've been much more relaxed about that size of it. But, my God, the young women in Los Angeles!"

Winslet drags hard on her cigarette and exhales skyward. "Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures suited to a fantasy world. Acting is about being real, being honest. Ultimately, the audience doesn't love you or want to be with you because of what you face looks like or because of the size of you backside. They've got to love you because of the honesty within your soul. As an actor, for me to conform physically in such a way would just be taking me to a plane of complete unreality, which is not what it's about. I would be doing everything that I always said I would never do.

And yet," she adds quietly after a moment, "I understand how some of this happens. The hardest thing about working in a film environment - and all Los Angeles is a film environment - is that you're immersed in a fantasy world all the time. It's goddamn safe. Everything's done for you. Your life outside your work stops for that period of time. Then, the shoot is over. Suddenly, you have to wash your own knickers on the weekend. I always love to get back to that reality. Others don't."

Here's another Kate on weight quote from a London Evening Standard article from January 20th, 1998.

"On Jude I said to Chris Eccleston in our big, nude love scene that I wished I could lose a bit of weight and he said, 'You've got to be joking. It would be like shagging a bloke!' As a younger actress it's easy to think to be successful you have to be thin, and I used to feel like that. I am a slim, normal sort of shape now but, at the same time, I'm a woman and I've got boobs and I've got a bum. I am probably nine and a half stone, but I haven't checked."

And from the March 5th Rolling Stone interview:

At sixteen, Winslet had a turning point, on the set of a TV drama called Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Winslet, at five feet six inches, weighed 185 pounds. She had a small part, as the daughter of a very heavyset woman. One afternoon, the director strolled past the two actors, sized them up and observed, "God, the likeness is extraordinary." The comment shocked Winslet. "I looked at this woman, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, and I just thought, Shit, shit, this has got to change. This has got to go."' A year later, a trim Winslet had her part in Heavenly Creatures. To be a veteran actress at twenty-two is also to be a veteran interview subject, and Winslet has mastered the trick by which even life's painful moments become riffs. Winslet explains her old nickname, which was Blubber, and one later (from Cameron): Kate Weighs-a-Lot. "I was chubby as a child," she says. "When I was sixteen, I was fat. It was a family thing. We're all big eaters. My uncle is a chef. My mother is a fantastic cook. Kind of unavoidable. I sensibly lost the weight doing Weight Watchers. End of story."

Here's a wonderful little excerpt from an article in British Vogue from January '98:

"When I was 15, I was 13 stone. I was told to lose weight for a part by an American casting agent and I went into overdrive, got completely fanatical. I got quite thin and ill, my family were very worried about me. And I frightened myself. So I started eating sensibly, did the Weight Watchers thing where you actually do get a lot of food, and lost it properly. Believe me, it is still a thrill to be able to sit in front of the telly without hugging my stomach; to be able to run up the stairs without thinking about it."

Hollywood is not exactly renowned for its sensitive treatment of female teen stars. Everyone's heard the tale of Judy Garland having her breasts strapped down for "The Wizard Of Oz" and being put on diet pills that left her addicted for the rest of her life, and read about the 'Watch Out Batman, Here Comes Buttgirl!' headline in the The National Enquirer when Alicia Silverstone looked a little chunky in her PVC Batgirl catsuit. For an adolescent girl with a precarious body image, a career in the movies must have been trying. What kept her from losing it? "Emma Thompson. We were filming 'Sense and Sensibility' and she could tell I was skipping lunch, pretending I'd had breakfast. She took me aside and said, 'Losing weight is absolutely wrong for the part and absolutely wrong for you. Do you want to be a twig, or a heart and soul that is true?'"

She is pretty happy about her weight nowadays (although she stills dreads premieres, thinking that she has to starve herself for a week to look thin enough on the night). "Leo DiCaprio said to me, 'Honey, you're always going to have that 'I'm a fat girl' thing. Forget it, you're gorgeous.'"

Another (female) journalist criticized the British press for its derision of Kate's weight. Here is Allison Pearson's article from a March issue of the London Evening Standard:

Why all this appalling spitefulness? To the 22-year-old, who was nicknamed "Blubber" at stage school, and embarked on diets so ferocious they made her faint, it must feel like a carton of Saxa being poured into a gaping wound. What's more, it comes at a time when we should be shouting her achievements from the rooftops.

Kate Winslet is that simple, miraculous thing: a great actress. Since Heavenly Creatures, in which she played a teenager so besotted with another that she incites her to murder, Kate has shown us how a nice, no-nonsense girl from Berkshire can transform herself into passion's slave. Think of her Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, breathing rapturous plausibility into a romantic dope, or of her Rose in Titanic, blooming and growing in the warmth of Leo Di Caprio's love.

Many women I know are shocked by the treatment meted out to Kate Winslet. We don't understand how the media can lament the pain of anorexia one day and lampoon a size 14 the next. We feel that the actress is a fantastic role model for our daughters - a real female with a proper bosom, a proper bottom and a proper perspective on the suffocating vanity that cuts off oxygen to the brains of so many in her trade.

Unlike Kate Moss, who commands a devoted Press for beauty that is a trick of nature, Kate Winslet has perfected the elusive knack of making loveliness out of art. Long after the supermodels are forgotten in their skinny graves, her ample, life-affirming radiance will shine out wherever movies are still shown. If she wins the Oscar on 23 March she will richly deserve it. Whether we deserve to hail her as Our Girl on that night, I very much doubt.

Here's what Kate had to say during the March 8th interview on "The Clive James Show" in Britain:

Here's an article from the March 9th Los Angeles Times, also defending Kate from the savagery of the media:

I've been tempted toward bulimia many times. That's because, like many other women, I take my cues from Hollywood. But with Kate Winslet in "Titanic," Hollywood is finally giving a beauty with an imperfect body a prominent role--a romantic lead--possibly even to test public reaction. [Abbagirl's comment: Excuse me? "Imperfect"? Exactly what are your standards of "perfection", I ask? To many - me included - Kate's body is perfect as it is.] And now she's been nominated for a best actress Oscar.

But poor Kate! Just when she thought she was making the movie that would catapult her to stardom's greatest heights, all that people could talk about was how fat she looked.

Review after review of "Titanic" was consumed by rantings of the zaftig redhead's moon-pie face and ballooning curves.

To wit, Barbara Shuglasser of the San Francisco Examiner wrote: "Winslet . . . ballooned by about 15 pounds from her last scene. For most of the movie, her head is so bloated that no amount of tricky camera angles can make her doughy face look interesting. There is nary a cheekbone on which a clever cinematographer could cast a mysterious lighting effect."

All this talk of blubber and cheekbones overshadows young Winslet's performance, which didn't get more than a half-sentence mention from any reviewer save for Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who agreed that "winsome" Leonardo DiCaprio blew her away. Perhaps they came to this conclusion because they were so busy watching DiCaprio's every facial twitch that they forgot to look at Winslet's stunning performance. Perhaps if Winslet were shaped less like a woman and more like a 16-year-old boy, she would have stood a better chance of getting into the two thumbs' good graces.

"Why Kate Winslet?" Larry King asked a stunned James Cameron, the film's director. "She's not drop-dead gorgeous." Perhaps after eight wives, King, too, prefers something that looks more like a boy.

Never mind Winslet's statuesque beauty and classic porcelain-doll features. Nevermind that her costumes, recently auctioned off, ranged no farther than size 6 to size 8. Apparently, anything that isn't the industry size 0 standard is substandard. Being a top actress in Hollywood means inspiring us to want to put an apron on and feed you.

Are we expecting such cookie-cutter perfection from our movie stars that we are incapable of detecting beauty through an extra pound? Winslet could gain another 25 pounds and still be exquisite. If anything, she was pleasantly plump in scenes--far from displeasing to the eye. In the packed movie house where I saw the film, all eyes seemed peeled for the Winslet scenes. Scenes without Winslet were spent waiting for scenes with Winslet.

In this contradictory state of affairs, Hollywood deserves congratulations. We have a clear case of Hollywood being smarter than the reviewers. Tinseltown is usually pushing unwholesome good looks to a viewing public that has been conditioned to accept Michelle Pfeiffer's bony tush as the norm. Hollywood finally did the right thing and gave us someone healthy to look at.

But some reviewers think we want the other Kate--waif Kate Moss--back.

The good news is: Not everybody is falling for it. Surprisingly, with the Internet as their forum, teenagers wrote in from all over the country in defense of the appetizing Kate.

On a Kate Winslet chat page, Eric J. Henwood-Greer wrote, "For the record, I am a going-on 17 male from Pennsylvania who thinks Kate Winslet is damn good looking, and the Kate Moss rave of the '90s irritates me. What do people nowadays think is 'normal'?"

Thank God the country is raising an aesthetically smarter generation, with real people who can recognize real beauty when they see it. And may they enjoy all the milkshakes their little hearts desire.

I wouldn't rush to say that our generation is aesthetically smarter; there are still millions of girls every year who destroy their bodies in anorexia and bulimia in the desire to look like the bony supermodels they see every day, touted as the ideal female image. Please! Just the fact that Kate's normal womanly body has been such a subject of discussion and controversy is testimony to the complete lack of positive images of women out there...

Here's an article from the March issue of Australian Who magazine:

An English rose in full bloom, Titanic star Kate Winslet refuses to prune back and become a typical Hollywood lightweight.

Sweeping into the Golden Globes in LA in January very late, very flustered but oh-so sumptuous in a va-voom tight lace dress, Kate Winslet confessed with a laugh to Who Weekly that she'd spent seven hours getting ready but "didn't every other girl here?" Quite possibly but every other girl did not have man-of-the-moment Matt Damon gushing over her at an aftershow party. Or Geoffrey Rush eagerly waiting to "pay homage at the shrine of Kate Winslet" at another. And, sadly, not every other girl woke up to the stinging headlines about themselves the next morning: KATE'S TITANIC WEIGHT BATTLE.

Since she swept from bow to stern on the disaster epic Titanic and then was plunged into grief just before its December opening with the news her former boyfriend and "love of my life" Stephen Tredre had died of bone cancer, the Brit actress is the first to admit that her 1.67m frame is a touch broader across the beam. In Hollywood, where the only female flesh permitted to jiggle is that encased in a C-cup, this forthright 22-year-old is making waves as one of the few (stand up also Kirstie Alley) proud to declare that not all women crave to be concave. They may be lone voices in a sea of high-profile waifs, but in reality, they're speaking for the masses; The average Western woman is 1.63m tall and weighs 64kg. And, according to the National Heart Foundation, 66 per cent of Australian women wear a size 14 or larger.

"I now accept that I am a womanly shape and do not have the figure of most Hollywood actresses," asserted Winslet, who'll be vying for a Best Actress Oscar at the Academy Awards on March 23, to Britain's Sunday Times. "I am not a twig and I refuse to be one."

Winslet has not always had such a healthy attitude to her body. She has confessed to fad dieting (including stints of eating only dry cereal and apples), explaining to Movieline magazine recently how "at 19, I went from pillar to post about my body and spent at least 95 per cent of my head-space everyday thinking about what I looked like. When I was making Sense and Sensibility, Emma Thompson noticed that I'd skip lunch and not eat properly. She said, 'If you dare try and lose weight for this job, I will be furious with you.' She went out and bought me The Beauty Myth, and since then, I've been much more relaxed about that side of it. But, my God, the young women in Los Angeles!" In her favourite LA coffee house, Starbucks, Winslet added, "you see all these incredibly thin women, toned, no body fat, who stand at the counter and go, 'Can I get a decaf, no milk, and a low-fat scone?' And I trot up to the counter and go, very loudly, 'Can I have a latte, please, extra hot, and one of those maple nut oat scone things? Actually, I'll get two of them!' "

That Winslet's curves have taken centre stage "simply highlights the unnatural expectations that Hollywood forces on female actors", says New Zealander Peter Jackson, who directed Winslet in 1994's Heavenly Creatures (she told Movieline he's "like my godfather"). "Kate is refusing to conform to the emaciated stereotype, and is to be congratulated." Casting director Joel Thurm (Taxi, Grease) is also on her side. "The camera can add 10 or 20 pounds [4.5 to 9kg], but with Kate," he says, "let her eat her cake. She's a real actress and it doesn't matter."

Acting, agrees Winslet, is about being real and honest. "Ultimately, the audience doesn't love you or want to be with you because of what your face looks like or because of the size of your backside," she told Movieline. "they've got to love you because of the honesty within your soul."

This thorny English rose has those qualities in spades. Frank, insightful and articulate, Winslet is a modern Scarlett O'Hara. She smokes roll-your-owns like a chimney, swears like a stevedore, favours Harley Davidson biker boots ("I can't wear pathetic little shoes") and won't travel without Coligor, the noseless toy bunny she's had since she was 2. What stops her getting sucked down by HMS Hollywood is her family. Winslet grew up in a modest three-bedroomed semi in the shadow of Reading Football Club, west of London, the daughter of Roger, an actor, and Sally, a housewife. Sisters Anna, now 25, and Beth, 19, are both actresses. Brother Joss, 17, is a student. "We didn't have a bedroom of our own," Kate told Britain's Daily Mail, "and we were lucky if we got 50p to buy sweets on a Saturday."

Her grandparents ran a 60-seat repertory theatre from their back garden, and all the siblings, Beth says, acted "from a very young age", with Kate "always very loud and gregarious". Nativity plays are still a Winslet tradition each Christmas. "Sometimes," says Beth, Kate "gets to be David, and sometimes the donkey".

At 9, Kate signed up with a local amateur theatre group and by 11 she'd convinced her in London's £1,000-a-term Redroofs Theatre School, where principal June Rose remembers her as "very bright", breezing through her final year exam with an A. Her first job, for £60, was at 13 for a Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal commercial, before she began to earn regularly doing ads and voiceovers. "I knew, right from the start, that it was not a matter of putting on red lipstick and tying your hair in bunches and saying 'I want to be a star'," she told Britain's Sunday Times. Her father, Roger, told WHO: "We tried to teach her to be realistic because it's a business. And you could be here one minute and the next you're nowhere."

There were other life lessons, too. Throughout her youth, Winslet wrestled with her yo-yoing figure. "Putting on weight easily runs in the family," she told WHO in 1996, adding "Up to the age of 16 I was 185 pounds [84kg]." She was nicknamed Blubber "for a good two or three years" at school, yet "really didn't think I was ugly".

But the acting profession was ready to dash her self-confidence. The crunch came at 16 when she appeared in the British TV drama Casualty as the daughter of a 135kg woman. Winslet realised she'd been cast because it looked plausible that she could end up that weight herself. "I went into overdrive," Winslet admitted in Vogue's January issue, "got completely fanatical. I got quite thin and ill, my family were very worried about me. And I frightened myself. So I started eating sensibly, did the Weight Watchers thing were you actually do get a lot of food, and lost it properly." Over 18 months, she offloaded 22kg. Not long after, while working in a London deli "making pastrami and dill sandwich", Winslet learned she'd beaten 175 others for Jackson's chilling Heavenly Creatures, a dramatisation of the true story of a New Zealand girl who helped beat her friend's mother to death with a brick in 1954. Next up was her voluble, soul-baring performance as the impetuous Marianne Dashwood in the 1995 screen adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, for which she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The night the nominations were announced, Winslet (who is mostly vegetarian, though she sometimes eats chicken) celebrated with a dinner of brown rice with sesame oil, rice cakes, dried figs and champagne.

All gloves - and indeed corsets - were off for her next role as feisty Sue Bridehead in 1996's Jude, a haunting period drama based on the Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure. A full nudity scene, plus a harrowing birth shot complete with prosthetic genitals and baby, made Winslet "so nervous", she told WHO at the time. "I starved myself for a month. I went through all the paranoias: My bum's massive. My breasts are saggy. I've got a spotty back, chicken arms. I can't do it." But she did. "I just had to keep remembering the scene was a real turning point and get on with it. And at the end of the day you forget you're completely naked."

She also went sunny side up later that year as the luminously mad Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. But it was the sketching scene in Titanic, where her frosty society character Rose finally thaws to bare all for rakish artist Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) that is etched in most moviegoers' memories.

Even though Winslet has whittled to 56kg, director James Cameron reportedly dubbed his leading lass "Kate Weighs-a-Lot" because she'd put on a few kilos during filming. Since Titanic wrapped, she has happily added at least 6kg. "I'm a women and I have boobs and a bum," she said at the Golden Globes. "I'm probably 60kg but I haven't checked."

Dr Robert Lefever, director of Promis, a specialist centre in London dealing with eating disorders, applauds Winslet's frankness. "If you look smart and feel good that's all you need," he says, "goes to their thighs and their tummies and their breasts and their bottoms and they think, 'God this is terrible.' In fact, meanwhile all the boys have got their tongues hanging out."

Meanwhile, Winslet isn't afraid to put her body on the line for her work. "She is fearless," says Branagh. "She is not afraid to try things out." That meant throwing herself lock, stock and bonnet into action scenes. During the filming of Titanic in Mexico she chipped an elbow, almost drowned in the finale, caught the flu, suffered hypothermia and admitted that on several days she thought, "Please God, let me die." On the set of Sense and Sensibility she passed out twice from hypothermia, suffered a swollen knee and a sprained wrist. After Heavenly Creatures she cried for two days with nervous exhaustion. In Marrakech, Morocco, for her latest film, Hideous Kinky, a drama set in the '70s and based on a novel by the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, she was plagued with amoebic dysentery.

It was also on the set of Hideous that she learned of the death of Tredre, on Dec. 8, just 11 days before Titanic opened. The pair had met in 1991, when both were acting on the BBC-TV children's sci-fi show Dark Season. They set up house in London almost immediately, but 4 years later the romance reached its "natural conclusion", explained Winslet, adding she still regarded Tredre as "the most important thing in my life after my family". Save for a three-month "fling" with British actor Rufus Sewell, Winslet has been single since. "I now know that I will never get involved in a relationship if I don't feel it is going somewhere profound," she has said. "Instead, I will sit back and wait until that certain person walks into my life."

Until then, she's bought a "seriously luxurious" north London flat with fireplaces and balconies and keeps it filled with friends. On a normal day, Winslet swims 1.5km, reads a script and perhaps goes out to "see a film in the evening. Pick my feet. Brush my teeth - I floss very rarely." She's not in the least bit tempted to base herself in Hollywood, where on each visit she finds herself fantasising about "eating whole jars of Branston pickle, and Marmite on Sunblest bread, and Flora or Stork margarine . . . or eating chips out of a paper bag on a wet Brighton beach. They are sort of heavenly thoughts." From a heavenly creature, no less.