Actress Kate Winslet: I “Still Sort of” Feel Like the “Fat Kid”
Kate Winslet says she didn’t always want to be famous.
“I was fat. I didn’t know any fat famous actresses,” she tells December’s Vanity Fair. “I just did not see myself in that world at all, and I’m being very sincere.
“You know, once a fat kid, always a fat kid,” she adds. “Because you always think that you just look a little bit wrong or a little bit different from everyone else. And I still sort of have that.”
But she says she looks at “women who wear great jeans and high heels and nice little T-shirts wandering around the city and I think, ‘I should make more of an effort. I should look like that,’” she says. “But then I think, ‘They can’t be happy in those heels.’”
Winslet has become a hero to fans for refusing to bow to Hollywood pressure to be skinny. (In 2007, she won libel damages after Britain’s Grazia magazine falsely reported that she used a diet doctor.)
Still, she says, “everyone can commit to 20 minutes” of working out, “especially if there’s a glass of Chardonnay afterwards.”
Above all, the actress wants fans to know she’s just like them - zits and all.
When she walks her children (Mia, 8, and Joe, 5) to school, she says, “Some [parents] will even say to me, ‘O.K., what’s the secret with the skin?’ At which point I’m like, ‘Oh my God, there’s no secret. I have makeup on.’
“And by the way, since I turned 30, I’ve had an acne problem on my chin,” adds the actress. “I’m just like everybody else — I just know how to cover it. If you’d like me to show you how, I’d be more than happy.”
She says she is lucky she’s wed to Sam Mendes, who directs her and Leonardo DiCaprio in the December drama Revolutionary Road.
“I need to be looked after,” she tells the magazine. “I’m not talking about diamond rings and nice restaurants and fancy stuff - in fact, that makes me uncomfortable. I didn’t grow up with it, and it’s not me, you know?
“But I need someone to say to me, ‘Shall I run you a bath?’ or ‘Let’s go to the pub, just us.’ I mean, the things that make me happiest in the whole world are going on the occasional picnic, either with my children or with my partner,” she says. “Big family gatherings, and being able to go to the grocery store — if I can get those things in, I’m doing good.”
What would really make her happy? Winning an Oscar.
“Do I want it? You bet your f–king ass I do!” admits Winslet, who’s been nominated five times. “I think that people assume that I don’t care or don’t want it or don’t need it or something. It’s hard to be there five times, and I’m only human, you know? But I don’t go home and cry, because we’re all grown-ups here.”
PICTURES: Here are the first available stills from Kate’s new movie, “The Reader”. See the amazing trailer here!
