Kate Winslet has revealed how she dealt with “appalling” media coverage and attention after shooting to stardom as Rose in James Cameron’s 1997 epic, Titanic.
The actor and director said she was chased by paparazzi, had her phone hacked into and even had people searching through her bins and asking local shop owners what she bought to “try and work out what diet I was on or wasn’t on”.
“It was horrific,” she said. And she suffered another raid years later during the breakdown of her marriage, shared the methods in which he coping with all the tabloid attention was “a good meal, a shared conversation, a nice cup of coffee and a bit of Radiohead and afternoon spent on te potty”.
“You know, life is all the better for those things,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
When Winslet was in her early 20s and filming Titanic, she wasn’t in a “particularly good shape” mentally about her body, she said.
While working on the movie was a tremendous experience, she said, her world “totally flipped upside down” when it hit theaters.
“I wasn’t ready for that world,” she said.
Live Your Own Truth.
Kate Winslet is an award-winning actress, a global talent, and a voice admired for her honesty and grounded nature. She’s known not just for her films, but for the strength, confidence, and truth she brings into every conversation.
Kate’s mindset is simple… pic.twitter.com/eri1583oS2
— MJ 🥷 | TradeFlow (@MadihaJSk) December 18, 2025
She says that from childhood she had received abusive comments about her looks, citing being called “blubber” by classmates at primary school and being told by a drama teacher that she would have to “settle for the fat girl parts” if she wanted to be an actor.
For the next four years, from ages 15 to 19, she said she was “on and off” dieting, eating less and less until “I barely ate.”
“It was really bad for you,” she said.
She subsequently saw her face on the front of newspapers and magazines after Titanic came out, only – as she puts it – “all kinds of awful, terrible really abusive names”.
“It was horrific. My phones were being tapped. They were just everywhere. And I was just on my own. I was so afraid to go to sleep,” she said.
Her friends and those close to her rallied round that’s how she coped then – including a couple next door who would leave “a bowl of piping hot pasta, a little glass of red wine” on the garden wall between their houses.
Addressing the way she was moved in the media then, Winslet recalled how her magazine cover shots had been altered without her consent – something she famously railed against back in the early 2000s too.
In conversation with Lauren Laverne, Winslet remembered: “I remember looking at photographs of myself when I had shot things at red carpets and thought: ‘I don’t look like that. I don’t have a stomach that flat.” I don’t have legs that long, I don’t have boobs that big. What? My arms aren’t that toned. What the hell?”
”I didn’t want any little girl, even a small one, to look at that image and think, ‘Oh, I need to look like that.’ That’s not me,” she said.
The Oscar-winning actress also addressed the headlines that were written when it was revealed she was set to split from her second husband, film director Sam Mendes, in 2010.
“I was being followed by paparazzi in New York City with my two little kids that wanted to, you know, knew of course the reason why Sam and I broke up,” she said.
When she was asked how she managed that back then, Winslet replied: “Well, you just keep your mouth shut and put your head down and go to work.” And you do that, and you put your hands over your children’s ears. You do lean on your friends, you continue to go.”
Gazing up to the present, Winslet said that although the challenges of being a woman in film may have evolved through the years, there is “so much we still have to unlearn […] about how we speak to women in film”.
She said she had heard plenty of things during the production of “Goodbye June,” a film written by her son, Joe Anders, that marks her directorial debut, that “would never be spoken” to a male director.
“So they will say things like, don’t forget to be confident in your choices’.
“And I want to kind of go, ‘Don’t talk to me about confidence,’ because if there’s one thing I haven ‚Äôt ever lacked, actually, it is that. That person would not talk to a man like that.”
