Kate Winslet recalls some harsh comments from adults about her body when she was young, remarks that have stayed with her throughout her career.

Winslet, who is now 50, reflected on these moments during an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, as reported by several media outlets. She shared, “I was a bit on the stocky side. When I began to take acting more seriously and got a child agent, I distinctly remember a drama teacher telling me, ‘Well, darling, you’ll have a career if you’re prepared to play the fat girl roles.'”

Despite such discouraging comments, Winslet went on to star in iconic films such as Titanic, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, earning an Oscar along the way. She has a pointed response for that drama teacher now.

“Look at me now,” Winslet remarked, emphasizing the inappropriateness of such comments directed at young people.

Kate Winslet has always embraced her true self in Hollywood. In a conversation with Hoda Kotb on the Today show, the 48-year-old actress discussed maintaining her authenticity despite over two decades in the limelight. “You know, it’s fascinating how much the industry has evolved,” she shared with Kotb, 59, during their chat on Monday, February 26.

Winslet revealed that she was on and off diets from the age of 15 to 19, adding that “eventually I was barely eating.”

“It was really unhealthy,” she continued. “It’s the only thing in my life I really regret because you know, long-term, not eating properly or eating and panicking about what you’d eaten or waking up in the morning and the first thing I’d think about is, ‘Oh my God, do I look fatter, do I look fatter?’ That went on for a really long time.”

After all these years, Winslet also remembers the words of some of her classmates who made jokes about her appearance.

“I had a lot of kids tease me at primary school,” she revealed. “They would call me blubber. I wasn’t even overweight. I just had stocky thighs, and they would lock me in the art cupboard, and they would say, ‘Blubber’s blubbing in the art cupboard’ and things like that.”

Although Winslet is confident in who she is and how she looks today, she may just spark a conversation about how people speak to women.

During her experiences in Hollywood, the actress said she was told things as a first-time director that she isn’t sure would be expressed to a man in the same position.

Kate Winslet opened up about her post-Titanic fame’s impact on her real life. “I felt like I had to look a certain way, or be a certain thing,” Winslet, 48, told Porter in an interview published Monday, February 12. “And because media intrusion was so significant at that time, my life was quite unpleasant.” James […]

“They might say things like, ‘Don’t forget to be confident in your choices.’ And I want to sort of say, ‘Don’t talk to me about confidence,’ because if that’s one thing I haven’t ever lacked, actually, it’s exactly that,” she said. “That person wouldn’t say that to a man.”

Winslet will make her directorial debut in the upcoming movie Goodbye June. The film, which begins streaming on Netflix Wednesday, December 24, follows a group of fractured siblings who must come together under sudden and trying circumstances.

“I know it sounds a bit like sickly, but we had to really become a family in order to make it feel as real as possible and as relatable as possible,” Winslet told ScreenRant in an interview published Sunday, December 21, about her cast that includes Helen Mirren, Timothy Spall and Johnny Flynn. “You can’t just show up and do the job and go home again, it becomes something else. We were lucky on this film that that really happened.”