From having to settle for ‘fat girl roles’ as a teen to stardom: How Kate Winslet fought for her body’s truth

Titanic was a huge hit and its co-lead, 22-year-old Kate Winslet, a newly minted superstar. Amid Kate Moss’s era of skinny models, Winslet’s curves were ubiquitous in all the magazines and on red carpets. In a live interview on British television, a woman in the audience wanted to ask a question, “I’ve seen lots of pictures of you in the paper recently talking about your weight fluctuation. Is that true, Kate?” The actress, who was taken aback by the query, began to laugh awkwardly, responding as best she could. “Aren’t we all sick of the weight thing? We’re all sick of the weight thing. I’m a normal human being, we all go up and down, you know. The weight stuff that goes on in the papers, it just makes me ill,” Winslet said. “There’s so many young girls out there whose minds are getting messed up by this, and they should just stop.”

That televised moment is part of the archive accessed by the 50-minute French documentary Kate Winslet: A Quest For Authenticity (produced by Arte and available via Apple TV) in order to build out its portrayal of the career of one of the most influential performers of her generation. “I don’t know if she’s the best, but she’s unique. There’s no one like her,” says its director, Claire Duguet, in an EL PAÍS interview that took place at Unifrance, a film and television press event in Paris that the publication attended by invitation. “I like the answer she gave,” the director says, while hoping that today, the question would never be asked.

During that time, comedian Joan Rivers was cracking jokes like: “If Kate Winslet had dropped a few pounds, the Titanic would never have sunk.” The Reading-born actress, who today is just shy of 50 years old and recently starred in a biopic of photojournalist Lee Miller, was on the receiving end of constant ribbing about her weight. “One of the first things that attracted me to her was that she wasn’t trying to be beautiful. She was beautiful, but it wasn’t forced. After that first movie, I carried on going to the cinema, and she never has disappointed me,” says the director, who learned about movies under the tutelage of Agnès Varda (Duguet was her assistant for 20 years) and says she’s been fascinated with Winslet since she was 17 years old, when she saw Heavenly Creatures.

Still, the director was unable to get in contact with Winslet, and is aware that the actress may have preferred to wait to see a retrospective of her work — and perhaps, make a film that progressed past the series Mare of Easttown, in which Winslet refused to have one of her sex scenes digitally retouched. But Duguet knew precisely what message she was looking to share: “I wanted to show how much she was consistent, from the first to the end,” to draw the shape of a natural woman who has fought against those who would criticize her appearance, who refuses to be swayed by the siren call of mega-productions or romantic comedy (“I want to portray aligned lives,” she says in the documentary), is enthusiastically opposed to Botox (“I have wrinkles on my face, and the privilege of not hiding my true self,” she says in another appearance) and who even took the magazine GQ to court in 2003 for having Photoshopped her magazine cover.

Working-class, a British rarity

Winslet is also a performer who, contrary to the majority of British actors, shot to fame from a humble upbringing. A study by The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre for Channel 4 found in 2024 that only one in every 12 creatives working in U.K. film and television are from the working class, at least during the last decade. “That’s amazing. It puts another point of view on interpretation. Back in the 1950s, they put the man from the street into the cinema, like James Dean, like Marlon Brando. They don’t look like Cary Grant or James Stewart,” says Duguet, who recalls that Winslet once said in an interview that her family needed “social help sometimes to make it through the week, have food. Maybe it’s why she’s not in the star system.”

Parts of Winslet’s biography may even be visible in her on-screen work. The long silences employed by the actress in movies like Revolutionary Road and Wonder Wheel are studied in Duguet’s documentary as method acting. “I think it’s linked, because she has to fight to say, ‘my body, my image, I do whatever I want with my body.’ But I think she’s a very physical actress, too. She plays with all the muscle. She doesn’t want to conform her body, because her body is also part of her talent and her tools to express. Maybe if she was forced to be thin, she wouldn’t feel comfortable with her body and she wouldn’t act as well,” says the 47-year-old French auteur, who has also made documentaries focused on Betty Boop, Truffaut and Goddard.

The passage of the years and the rise of the MeToo movement have led Winslet to view her own career in a different light. In a 2020 interview with NPR while promoting Ammonite, she asked, “Have I really used my voice? Have I really said: ‘Hang on a minute, why would you position my character in the corner of the room by that nice, flattering light that’s coming through the window just because you want to see the curves of my breasts there?’ Like, why? That’s objectification, isn’t it?” Duguet believes this was a reference to Todd Field’s Little Children. Today, the director sees that film through other eyes. In contrast, during the production of Ammonite, Winslet choreographed sex scenes with her castmate Saoirse Ronan in search of new perspectives, and to escape the male gaze — to center the female gaze, as it were. “I felt the proudest I’ve ever felt doing a love scene on Ammonite. And I felt by far the least self-conscious,” Winslet told The Hollywood Reporter.

“You can see all these American actresses now going to the European female director to make the movie. Like Babygirl, like The Substance. There is more work to do always about the female gaze,” says Duguet. But Winslet has always been conscious of her own body, ever since she had her first fan site dedicated to her after the release of Sense and Sensibility, when she was 19. When she was 11, she played Alice in Wonderland in a high school play. At 14, a professor told her she’d do well if she contented herself with playing “fat girl roles.” “Look at me now!” she declared after picking up her third BAFTA award for the movie Steve Jobs.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition