Kate Winslet has revealed that she’d had “intimate encounters” with the same sex when she was younger.
Winslet made the admission for the first time on a recent episode of the Team Deakins podcast, while discussing her debut role in the 1994 Peter Jackson-directed drama-thriller Heavenly Creatures.
Winslet appeared opposite Melanie Lynskey as two teenagers with a dangerously obsessive friendship. During her podcast appearance, she admitted that her “first intimate experiences” as a teenager were “with girls,” which helped her understand the “really intense connection” the film revolves around.
“I’ll share something I’ve never shared before. Some of my first intimate experiences as a young teen were actually with girls,” Winslet said. “I’d kissed a few girls, and I’d kissed a few boys, but I wasn’t particularly evolved in either direction.
“At that stage in my life, I certainly was curious, and I think there was something about the really intense connection that those two women had that I profoundly understood. I was so immediately sucked into the vortex of that world they were in that obviously became horrendously damaging to both of them, and they had huge insecurities and vulnerabilities.”
Heavenly Creatures was Winslet’s breakout role and she also revealed she had never held a script before she auditioned for the film. Following the film, she landed roles in Sense and Sensibility, Jude and Hamlet before landing her star-making role in Titanic in 1997.
Recommended
In other news, Winslet also recently revealed that she was told to “settle for the fat girl parts” when she was a child actor.
In it, she told host Lauren Laverne a story about an encounter with a drama teacher in the earliest stages of her career.
“I was a little bit stocky, when I did start taking it much more seriously and got a child agent, I remember vividly a drama teacher…and she said to me, ‘Well, darling, you’ll have a career if you’re ready to settle for the fat girl parts’,” she said.
“Look at me now. It’s appalling the things people say to children,” she added.
Winslet is currently promoting her directorial debut Goodbye June in which she also stars alongside Toni Collette, Johnny Flynn and Andrea Riseborough as the children of Helen Mirren and Timothy Spall, as they all gather around their dying mother during the Christmas period.
