Kate Winslet was just 20 years old when she was plucked from relative obscurity to star in “Titanic.” She’s had her pick of lead roles ever since.

Film critics we spoke to compare her to greats like Katharine Hepburn and Meryl Streep.

Winslet has a propensity for playing tough, angst-ridden women… and that’s exactly who she becomes in her latest film, “Lee” — which she also produced — about American photographer Lee Miller, one of the few female journalists on the front lines of World War II…

We met Winslet last month, at the theater where she performed as a teenager … and found her to be remarkably un-Hollywood — she drove herself to the interview… showed up alone… and dropped a few f-bombs… 

Kate Winslet: Well, the idea of going back on this stage still terrifies me. 

Cecilia Vega: So how do you get over the nerves? What do you tell yourself?

Kate Winslet: Oh, honestly, it’s a whole bunch of mind fucking. (laugh) I mean, it is, even to this day. Like anything, going for a job interview, it’s absolutely terrifying. If it’s a job you really want, doubly terrifying.

Cecilia Vega: You’ve said on the first day you walk in and think, everyone is in here thinking, ‘why did they cast her?’

Kate Winslet: Yeah, that. Oh my God.

Cecilia Vega: You are an Oscar winning actress.

Kate Winslet: So what? When I was doing ‘Lee,’ I would sit there and I would say, this is ridiculous. This, I can, I can truly think of at least five other brilliant actresses who would have played this part much better than me. Like a lot better. And often I will turn to another crew member and I’ll say, ‘They just, they just read the wrong name off the list. I’m telling you, they didn’t mean for me to be here.’ And I will have days –

Cecilia Vega: Meryl’s coming out of the back door now to take your role.

Kate Winslet: (laugh) Please welcome. Come on in. Delighted to have you.

That role that caused Kate Winslet so much angst– was for the movie “Lee.” She didn’t just star in it…she made it — her first as a producer 

Cecilia Vega: How much time did you spend at this house?

Kate Winslet: Oh my god. (laugh) I mean, a lot of time across seven years, yeah. 

Those years were spent at Lee Miller’s estate in the English countryside, where she lived with her husband – a British painter.

It’s where, with the help of Miller’s son, Winslet scoured the archives and decided to focus Miller’s life story not on her history as a model who had many lovers…

But as a troubled woman who in her late 30s left her glamorous life to become a war photographer– capturing some of the most haunting images from World War II – including some of the first uses of napalm and Nazi concentration camps….

Winslet says she knew it wouldn’t be an easy sell… 

Cecilia Vega: Tell me a little bit about what some of those phone calls were like. 

Kate Winslet: There was one potential investor who said to me, ‘why should I like this woman?’ I mean, she’s drunk, she’s, you know, she’s like loud. She, I mean, he just probably stopped short of saying she has wrinkles on her face.

Cecilia Vega: You had a director say something like, I’ll get your little ‘Lee’ funded?

Kate Winslet: Oh yeah.

Cecilia Vega: You want to share names now?

Kate Winslet: Never, never no. That’s not my vibe, no. No but so this director did say, yeah, tell you what, if you’ll be in my film, I’ll help you get your little Lee Miller film made. And he actually went ‘Like that’ and I was like, ‘Might just have lost signal.’ Oop.

She didn’t make the movie with those men… instead… 

She insisted on bringing in a female director, co producer and writers…

Winslet was intimately involved in every step of production…as we saw during a scoring session last spring.

Alesandre Desplat: Uh, Kate?

Kate Winslet: Yeah.

Alesandre Desplat: It doesn’t feel too loud to you, does it?

Kate Winslet: Well, it’s funny.

Alesandre Desplat: Okay. It’s too loud. Let’s do it again.

She also enlisted a historian to make an exact replica of Miller’s camera … and really took pictures while she was acting…

Cecilia Vega: Why did you feel like you had to learn this craft?

Kate Winslet: It couldn’t just be a prop. It needed to feel like an extension of my arms. I had to be confident and comfortable with it. And in order to do that, I had to know what I was doing.

She spends months, even years, preparing for roles…

Inventing an elaborate backstory for every character — down to what sport they played in school and how they feel about their mothers.

She’s learned to dig for fossils, make dresses and free dive – holding her breath for more than 7 minutes for “Avatar” 2.

And she’s not afraid of being exposed…

Because to see a Kate Winslet movie often means you’ll see a lot of Kate Winslet…

And then… there’s the accents… 

She won an Emmy for “Mare of Easttown”… playing a vaping, beer swigging detective – nailing the *specific* sound of Delaware County, a Philadelphia suburb…

Cecilia Vega: And why is Philly so hard?

Kate Winslet: It’s actually the “I” sound in the Philadelphia, in the Delco dialect that is really difficult. They don’t say “that’s nice.” They say, “That’s nice. I like your bike.” (laugh)

And though she may seem like someone with a shelf full of Oscars, she won her first, and only in 2009 for her portrayal of a Nazi prison guard in “The Reader”… 

For years, she kept the statue in her bathroom… so guests could hold it up in the mirror and pretend to win….

We went with Winslet to Reading… the working class town just outside London where she was born and raised.

Cecilia Vega: This is the house?

Kate Winslet: Oh, my God. This is the house. 

The front door boarded up… her family no longer lives here.

Kate Winslet: I lived here until, when I was sort of 16, and I kind of left home, really, when I was 16. 

Winslet is second of four children…

Her father was a struggling actor who often gave his daughter the advice she still lives by: “you’re only as good as your last gig”… 

Kate Winslet: He would sort of hop from job to job and then he would do, you know, part time work to make ends meet in the meantime. But the thing that was interesting, I think, is that even though there was so little, as you can see, to go around, we were really happy. 

With financial help from a charity for actors, she enrolled in a local theater school when she was 11… catching the train into London for auditions… 

She says the scrutiny of her appearance started young…

Cecilia Vega: You once had a drama teacher tell you settle for the fat girl parts.

Kate Winslet: Oh, yeah. “Now, listen, Kate, I’m telling you, darling, if you’re going to look like this, you’ll have to settle for the fat girl parts.” And I was never even fat.

Cecilia Vega: What did that do to your spirit, your confidence?

Kate Winslet: It made me think, I’ll just show you. Just quietly. It was like a sort of a quiet, uh, determination, really. 

This grocery store was once the deli where 16-year-old Winslet was working when she got the news that she’d landed her first movie.

Kate Winslet: And I was making a sandwich and the phone rang, and I swear to God there was something about the way the phone rang. 

Cecilia Vega: You knew?

Kate Winslet: I was like ‘Oh my God, that’s for me. I wonder if it’s about the job. And then the owner was like, ‘Kate, phone for you.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ So I ran and, and was, uh, told that I’d gotten this part. And then I was just so unraveled I had to leave. I was like, ‘I have to go home and tell mom and dad.’

After filming that first movie, “Heavenly Creatures” — Winslet went right back to making sandwiches.

Cecilia Vega: That must have been kind of a – what is going on in my world here?

Kate Winslet: No, because that was what I knew. You know, my dad would do jobs and he’d go back to, you know, tarmacing the roads or working as a postman or – So I just thought, oh, well, that’s what you do as an actor, you know. If you’re lucky, you get a job and then you go back to a day job.

At 20, she got the offer for the part that would make Hollywood history. 

Playing Rose, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack… in “Titanic” — the first film to break a billion dollars at the box office…

Winslet was game to discuss just about anything – but…

Cecilia Vega: Let’s talk about “Titanic.”

Kate Winslet: Really?

Cecilia Vega: I was wondering what your reaction would be if I said that to you.

Kate Winslet: No, I’m happy to talk about “Titanic.”

Cecilia Vega: I guess it wouldn’t be an interview with you if we didn’t talk about Titanic in some way.

Kate Winslet: It could be an interview without it.

We *tried* to ask about the famous scene that has sparked decades of debates…

Cecilia Vega: May I ask…True? Leo really could have fit on the raft?

Kate Winslet: You know what? I have no idea.

Cecilia Vega: Does it annoy you at all that 27 years later this movie still comes up in this way and probably will for the rest of your life?

Kate Winslet: No… I tell you what I do sometimes find, um, just curious, I suppose, is whatever I say about Titanic will often be the take home so I just think, ‘Oh, well, there were those things that I said about the film I was talking about,’ and yet that’s the one thing. So that’s the only thing that sometimes I just think, hmm..

While “Titanic” made Winslet a star, she says it came at a cost … paparazzi aggressively pursued her – and just listen to how she was ridiculed for her weight:

1998 GOLDEN GLOBES PRE-AWARDS SHOW: Kate looks a little melted and poured into that dress…and you know, she just needed two sizes larger and it would probably have been OK…

Cecilia Vega: I gasped at how cruel some of that coverage was of you at that time.

Kate Winslet: I know. It’s absolutely appalling. What kind of a person must they be to do something like that to a young actress who’s just trying to figure it out? 

Cecilia Vega: Did you ever get face to face with any of those people?

Kate Winslet: I did get face to face…

Cecilia Vega: What did you say?

Kate Winslet: I let them have it. I said, I hope this haunts you. It was a great moment. It was a great moment because it wasn’t just for me. It was for all those people who were subjected to that level of harassment. It was horrific. It was really bad. 

Now 49, Winslet says she developed an armor that she brings to characters, like Lee Miller…

Kate Winslet: People say, “Oh, you were so brave for this role. You didn’t wear any makeup.” You know, “You had wrinkles.” Do we say to the men, “Oh, you were so brave for this role. You grew a beard?” No. We don’t.

Cecilia Vega: That still happen to you?

Kate Winslet: Yes. (laugh) It happens to me all the time. it’s not brave. It’s– it’s playing the part.

Cecilia Vega: Is it true that a crew member came up to you and said, ‘You might want to kind of sit up a little bit. You’re showing a lump.’

Kate Winslet: Yeah. ‘You might want to kind of just sit in, suck in, sit up.’ And I was like – 

Cecilia Vega: You didn’t?

Kate Winslet: No. (laugh) No, I don’t think Lee would have done– It’s about knowing that Lee’s– her ease with her physical self was hard won. 

Cecilia Vega: In Hollywood, you could have a lotta great lights so that you don’t see the lump that we all have, the bumps that we all have.

Kate Winslet: Yeah, no, I’m done– I’m done–

Cecilia Vega: You don’t care about showing that–

Kate Winslet: No, I don’t, I don’t.

Cecilia Vega: Why not?

Kate Winslet: It’s exhausting…

When she’s not filming, Winslet lives far from the spotlight in a quiet English seaside village.

She and her husband Ned Abel Smith have a 10-year old son. She also has a 20-year-old son and 24-year-old daughter from previous marriages…

Winslet is not on social media and told us she doesn’t read reviews of her work…but this much she knows…

Kate Winslet: It’s hard to make films about historical female figures. You know, typically, those aren’t films that would necessarily do well in the box office. Says she, sitting here proudly telling you that her film has taken in over 25 million so far. Cha Ching. And we made a film about one woman…

Cecilia Vega: So there’s not a sense of I told you so.

Kate Winslet: No, I don’t feel like that. But I just hope they’ve seen the film.

Produced by Ayesha Siddiqi. Associate producer, Kit Ramgopal. Broadcast associate, Katie Jahns. Edited by Peter M. Berman.

Cecilia Vega

Cecilia Vega is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and “60 Minutes” correspondent who joined the CBS newsmagazine in 2023.