Kate Winslet has revealed that she was told she would only be able to bag “fat girl” roles when she first started acting.
The 47-year-old actress, who recalled being told to accept that she would be typecast because of her weight while she was a student, said that it didn’t get much better once she hit Hollywood.
Later on, when Winslet started booking big-screen roles, her agent was often asked: “How’s her weight?”
“It can be extremely negative,” she told The Sunday Times. “People are subject to scrutiny that is more than a young, vulnerable person can cope with.
“But in the film industry, it is really changing.
“When I was younger my agent would get calls saying, ‘How’s her weight?’ I kid you not. So it’s heartwarming that this has started to change.”
The Titanic star spoke out earlier this year against Hollywood putting pressure on women to be skinny on screen.
And when it was recently brought to her attention by director Craig Zobel that her “bulgy bit of belly” could be removed from a sex scene with co-star Guy Peace in Mare Of Easttown, she hit back with, “Don’t you dare!”
“Listen, I hope that in playing Mare as a middle-aged woman… I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters,” she told The New York Times.
“She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from.”
Back in 2021, she also slammed the public scrutiny of her body that she faced after the release of Titanic back in 1997, calling it “horrible and so upsetting.”
“In my 20s, people would talk about my weight a lot,” she told the Guardian.
“I would be called to comment on my physical self. Then I got this label of being ballsy and outspoken. No, I was just defending myself.”
The actress next appears in Avatar: The Way of Water on December 16.
