Why Kate Winslet is full of awesomeness
Kate Winslet’s already garnered some blog love at The-F-Word for her refusal to lose weight to conform to the Hollywood stick-figure ideal, but after reading this People interview with her, she definitely deserves some more.
Winslet spoke to People about appearing nude in her upcoming film The Reader. Of course, the magazine’s focus isn’t on Winslet’s talents or the film itself, but rather on her shocking decision not to use a body double or to lose weight or change her lifestyle in preparation for her au naturale debut. What’s her “secret,” People asks the 33-year-old celeb. Prepare yourself for some mindnumbing stuff here. Says Winslet:
“My body’s different. It has settled into what it is now. None of this different diets lark. I can’t remember the last time I tried some new fad… Nobody is perfect. I just don’t believe in perfection. But I do believe in saying, ‘This is who I am and look at me not being perfect.’ I’m proud of that.”
The five-time Oscar nominee and mom of two tells People that while she does what she can to stay healthy, she prefers to “keep it simple.” She doesn’t employ a trainer or chef; she cooks at home and eats anything except for pasta and not because carbs are evil numbers to be avoided for fear of assumed fat-inducing properties, but because it gives her a “stomachache.” She does Pilates in the comfort of her living room because it’s “time-efficient” and “barely break[s] into a sweat.”
Messages of body acceptance are nothing new for the talented actress who’s long gone on the record blasting the Hollywood size-zero obsession — and its not all empty rhetoric. Last year, Winslet was quoted as saying, “I’ve just started subtly telling [daughter] Mia, ‘I love my belly. You and Joe came out of there. I’m proud of my belly and I’m proud of my hips. I love my body.’” In an interview with the BBC, she said that she refuses to keep magazines in the house because she worries that Mia will see the models and buy into the thinness ideal:
“It is unbelievably disturbing what’s going on at the moment,” said Winslet. “Young girls are impressionable. What I resent is that there is an image of perfection that is getting thinner and thinner. It’s only a matter of time before Mia becomes aware of it and that frightens the life out of me.”
I’ve always liked Winslet because she’s an accomplished actress and I generally like the films she stars in (I liked Titanic on first watching, by the second and third viewing forced upon me by my then-10-year-old sister, it became monotonous). What makes me like her as a person is the fact that she appears astonishingly body-positive and self-accepting and isn’t afraid to stand her ground even in the maddeningly thin-obsessed and high-pressure entertainment industry. That she’s a staunch anti-fur advocate is just the icing on the proverbial cake.
Yet Winslet’s no body image superwoman and she admits to grappling with the same body image issues that plague other women. What I admire most is not her admitting of the struggle — although its important to let other women know that even the most self-confident among us aren’t immune to body image pressures — but rather the fact that while Winslet may sometimes fall victim to these pressures, she never lets them consume her. Case in point: Winslet revealed in a recent Vanity Fair photo spread and interview — which does fortunately focus on her actual talents and lesser so on her body — that she sometimes today feels like the “fat kid” she used to be. (Read more about her teenage weight issues and the resulting harassment here).
This is going to sound really weird,” she muses, “but I never had a desire to be famous. I never had huge ambitions—never.… I was fat. I didn’t know any fat famous actresses. 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. 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. I often look 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. But then I think, They can’t be happy in those heels.”
Winslet is far from fat, although at a rumoured U.S. size 6, she’s colossal by insane and unrealistic Hollywood standards. I wouldn’t even label her with the “rubenesque” and “full-figured” euphemisms for fat so many media outlets annoyingly persist in attaching to female celebrities who aren’t a size-2 or smaller. While Winslet may not fulfill that role model of the “fat famous actress” for aspiring actresses to come, her unwillingness to lose weight and her consistent condemnation of disturbing and increasing aesthetic pressures on women — celebs or otherwise — makes her an awesome role model all the same in my book.
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