Before Titanic came out, Kate Winslet wasn’t exactly an unknown. She’d already nabbed an Oscar nomination, for the hit Jane Austen movie Sense and Sensibility. She’d been in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (alongside no less than Melanie Lynskey), played Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour Hamlet film. Heck, she was in A Kid in King Arthur’s Court. But the then-highest grossing movie ever made (not adjusted for inflation) took her several rungs higher on the fame latter, and being Titanic-level famous? No, sir, she did not like it.
“I felt like I had to look a certain way, or be a certain thing, and because media intrusion was so significant at that time, my life was quite unpleasant,” Winslet told Net-a-Porter, in a bit caught by Deadline.
She added, “Journalists would always say, ‘After Titanic, you could have done anything and yet you chose to do these small things’… and I was like, ‘Yeah, you bet your f*ckin’ life I did! Because, guess what, being famous was horrible.’”
Not that she regretted starring James Cameron’s absurdly beloved mega-blockbuster. “I was grateful, of course,” she said. “I was in my early twenties, and I was able to get a flat. But I didn’t want to be followed literally feeding the ducks.”
Mind you, Winslet doesn’t fame that much anymore. “Oh, it’s such a ridiculous word!” she said. “I wear it really lightly. It’s not a burden, any of it. [Titanic] continues to bring people huge amounts of joy. The only time I am like, ‘Oh god, hide’, is if we are on a boat somewhere.”
Another way of looking at it: Had she not done Titanic, there’s a chance some of her finest work never would have come her way. Had she not played Rose, would she have found herself many years later outside of Philadelphia falling in love with Wawa? Maybe, but maybe not.
(Via Net-a-Porter and Deadline)
