Kate Winslet wanted her Lee Miller biopic to be as real as possible.
The actress, who also produces the WWII-set indie, portrays former model turned war correspondent and photographer Miller in “Lee.” Winslet told Harper’s Bazaar U.K. that she deliberately wanted to showcase her real body and not hide her “belly rolls” while in character.
“There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini,” Winslet said. “And one of the crew came up between takes and said, ‘You might want to sit up straighter.’ So you can’t see my belly rolls? Not on your life! It was deliberate, you know?”
Winslet added that she takes “pride” in her aging process.
“It is my life on my face, and that matters,” the Oscar winner said. “It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up. I think people know better than to say, ‘You might want to do something about those wrinkles.’ I’m more comfortable in myself as each year passes. It enables me to allow the opinions of others to evaporate.”
Winslet previously told Vogue in 2023 that she “had to be really fucking brave about letting my body be its softest version of itself and not hiding from that” for the film.
“Believe me, people amongst our own team would say, ‘You might just want to sit up a bit.’ And I’d go, ‘Why? [Because of] the bit of flesh you can see? No, that’s the way it’s going to be!’” Winslet echoed at the time.
Winslet has explained how she was forced to endure “bullying” over her appearance after the release of films “Heavenly Creatures” and “Titanic.” She said she struggled with an eating disorder at one point.
“I was already experiencing huge amounts of judgment, persecution, all this bullying,” Winslet said. “People can call me fat. They can call me what they want. But they certainly cannot say that I complained and I behaved badly, over my dead body. I would not have known how to do that without people in power turning around and saying, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, you know, her again, that complainer.’ I would rather suffer in silence than ever let that happen to me, even still today.”
