Kate Winslet is revisiting a trying period in her life, reflecting on the harsh comments directed at her body during the onset of her acting career. "I was a bit on the sturdy side," the Titanic star recalled during her upcoming appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, as reported by Deadline. "When I started taking my career more seriously and got a child agent, I distinctly remember a drama teacher...who said to me, 'Well, darling, you'll have a career if you're ready to settle for the fat girl parts.'"
"Look at me now," the Oscar winner added with a hint of disbelief. "That wasn't very nice, was it? It's appalling the things people say to children." Winslet, who made her acting debut at 15 in the BBC's Dark Season, shared that she struggled with an unhealthy diet, including "barely eating," from ages 15 to 19. "It's the only thing in my life I really regret in the long term," she noted. "Not eating properly or eating and panicking about what you've eaten, or waking up in the morning and the first thing I thought about was, 'Oh my God, do I look fatter? Do I look fatter?' That went on for a really long time."
Although Winslet began her diet at a young age, her struggles with body image began even earlier, when her classmates teased her about her looks. "I had a lot of kids tease me at primary school," she explained. "They would call me blubber. I wasn't even overweight. I just had sturdy thighs, and they would lock me in the art cupboard and say, 'Blubber's blubbing in the art cupboard,' and things like that."
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind actress has a message for her former bullies: "You were bloody horrible to me, and you should be ashamed." Despite continuing to face bullying in high school, Winslet used the negativity as fuel for her ambition. "I learned to have a pretty thick skin fairly early on, to be honest," she shared. "But at the time it was happening, I threw myself into my theatre company and my creative world outside of school, so that the school mean people became as insignificant as I could possibly make them." As the director of Goodbye June puts it, "I wouldn't let them spoil a trajectory that I was determined I was on."
