“I felt like I had to look a certain way or be a certain way, and because the media intrusiveness was so great at the time, my life was quite unpleasant,” Winslet admitted in an interview with Porter magazine. The feeling she is talking about is about her rise to fame following the release of director James Cameron’s iconic film Titanic.
Winslet, alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, played the lead role in the 1997 film, which ultimately won 11 Oscars. “Journalists used to say, ‘After Titanic you could have done anything and yet you chose to do these little things’… and I was like, ‘Yeah, you bet I did!’ Because guess what: being famous was terrible.”
Bullied by the press
“It happened overnight,” she said of her sudden fame. “I was also subjected to a lot of physical criticism. The British press was actually very unkind to me.”
“I felt quite bullied, if I’m honest,” Winslet continues. “I remember thinking, ‘Okay, this is horrible and I hope it goes away.’ And it definitely went away, but it also made me realize that if that’s what being famous was, then I wasn’t ready to be famous, no thank you.”
Friendship with DiCaprio
Yet she also looks back positively on her experience with Titanic. For example, it led to her lifelong friendship with DiCaprio. “Once I started working with Leo, we were able to find our own rhythm. And it’s amazing to look back and think about it again,” she previously told Entertainment Tonight. “He was kind of a mess of long, skinny, uncoordinated limbs. And he was just very free with himself and he had this vibrant energy that was really magnetic,” she continued. “And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be fun. We’ll definitely get along. And we really did,” Winslet added.
“Leonardo DiCaprio was a kind of mess of long, thin, uncoordinated limbs. He had a vibrant energy that was truly magnetic.”
Kate Winslet
Actress
The actress no longer finds it difficult today. “Titanic continues to bring tremendous joy to people,” she says. “The only time I’m like, ‘Oh God, hide,’ is when we’re on a boat somewhere.”