Nine things we learned from Kate Winslet’s Desert Island Discs
Kate Winslet’s career has taken her from a deli counter in Reading to the Oscars in Hollywood. But fame, she says, was never the plan. On Desert Island Discs, she tells presenter Lauren Laverne about school bullying, fibbing in auditions, the price of fame, and why she values the small things in life.
Here are nine things we learned from her Desert Island Discs…
1. She was born in the middle of a Sunday roast
Kate Winslet was born in Reading in 1975, the second of four children, and she says her mum, Sally, “was an absolutely formidable woman”. The day Kate was born, Sally was making the Sunday roast. “Every Sunday she would make one, and there would be family and neighbours and friends. She was having contractions with me while serving up the meal. She turned to my dad and said, ‘Roger, I think, I think the baby might be coming.’”
I'd seen black and white photos of my grandparents performing on stage and I just thought, ‘I want to do that.'Kate Winslet on acting running in her family
Sally put the crumble in the oven, walked round the corner to the hospital, gave birth to Kate – “my dad says I shot out like a rocket” – went home and served the crumble. “That really does sum up my mum. She was an incredibly capable woman. She was capable of loving not only her own children, but everyone else's as well.”
2. Her dad can bring an audience to tears
Her father, Roger Winslet, was an actor too and Kate describes him as “a life force”. When she was 11, he had a boating accident that nearly killed him. “He lost his foot,” she explains. “Miraculously, it was put back on. Life did change a lot, and I think it definitely gave me a sense of needing to sort of fend for myself a bit.”
Her first disc, Georgia on My Mind, is one he loves to sing. After her mum died, he got up in a Vancouver doughnut shop, in the middle of a jazz night, and belted it out. “He brought the house down,” she says. “People were crying and clapping. There was an encore. That’s the magic of my dad.” Poignantly, Kate chooses a recording of her father singing the song.
3. Acting runs in the family, but her parents had their reservations
Kate grew up surrounded by actors. “I'd seen black and white photos of my grandparents performing on stage and I just thought, ‘I want to do that.’” Her grandmother trained at Italia Conti and was in the same class as Noël Coward. But her parents still had reservations about her ambitions to act. “My mum always said, ‘You’ve got to have another string to your bow’, and I’d think, ‘I don’t even know what that means.’ I was so convinced that acting was what I wanted to do.”
She has never looked back. “It's pretending. You play dress up, you put clothes on, you do voices, and you pretend. Flipping brilliant job!”
4. She paid her way through drama school one voiceover at a time
Kate attended Redroofs School for the Performing Arts in Maidenhead, but there was no guarantee she would be able to stay. Her mum made it clear: “You’ve got to get more voiceovers because next term, we just won’t be able to pay for it.”
They started calling me awful, terrible, actually abusive names… going through my bins to look for my shopping receipts, to figure out what diet I was on or wasn’t onKate Winslet on being targeted by the British tabloids
She took the challenge seriously. “Luckily I was really good at accents.” she explains. One company kept calling her back for dubbing work. “That would be £60 or £65 a day, which was a lot of money when you were 11. And that would go straight into the school fees pot.”
5. She landed her breakout film role mid-sandwich
It was while working behind a deli counter in Reading that the call came through saying she’d got the lead role in Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. “I was in the middle of making a sandwich. Chris, the manager, stuck his head out the door and said, ‘Kate, phone for you.’”
It was her child agent. “She just said, ‘Who’s a clever girl then?’ I remember running home in the rain and telling everybody. None of us could believe it. And it really was the beginning of everything.”
6. She was bullied and body-shamed at school – and then by the press
Kate was locked in the art cupboard and teased about her weight as a child. “You lot who were in my year at school, you were bloody horrible to me,” she says bluntly, “and you should be ashamed of yourselves!”
When her breakout role as Rose in Titanic in 1997 made her one of the most recognisable faces in the world, she says she wasn’t ready. “My whole world was totally turned upside down. I have so much to be grateful for. But I wasn’t in a particularly good place around my physical self at all.”
She was targeted again, this time by the British tabloids. “They started calling me awful, terrible, actually abusive names… going through my bins to look for my shopping receipts, to figure out what diet I was on or wasn’t on,” she recalls. “It was an utter disgrace. And thank God they don’t do that now.”
7. A white lie helped her land one of her most famous film roles
After her debut in Heavenly Creatures, Winslet was invited to audition for Sense and Sensibility, but not for the role she wanted. So, she and her agent had an idea.
“My agent said, ‘ They want to meet you for the character of Lucy Steele. Between you and I, we should cook up a plan where you're going to go in and pretend that you didn't get the memo, and you're going to prepare two or three scenes to read for the Marianne part. You're going to go in there and smash it.’ So that's what I did.”
8. She fell in love with her husband during a house fire on Richard Branson’s island
Kate met her husband, Ned, in dramatic fashion during a hurricane on Necker Island which started a house fire. She remembers him bursting in wearing a head torch, pink underpants, an orange rain jacket, and a grin. “Everyone was crying and distressed, and he went, ‘We’re alive!’” she laughs.
She also tells Lauren about the first time she ever saw him. “ Ned was arriving at the airport and he was waiting for all of his family, to greet them. Those airport sliding doors opened and there was Ned going ‘Wahey!’ with his arms in the air. And I looked at him and I thought, ‘Oh, it's you’. I felt like I'd taken off. And I just thought, ‘Sign me up.’”
9. Her happiest moments are quiet, warm, and a little bit silly
Despite her fame, Kate finds joy in the everyday. “I fall asleep being excited about the coffee I’m going to have in the morning,” she says, and picks freshly ground coffee as her luxury item on the desert island for its exfoliating properties as well as its taste.
When press intrusion and the other pressures of stardom get too much, she knows now how to cope. “You just keep your mouth closed, you put your head down, you keep walking. You lean on your friends. A good meal, a shared conversation, a nice cup of coffee, a bit of Radiohead and a good poo. Life's all the better for those things, don't you think?”
