Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Podcast, LGBTQ, Sex and Relationships
Kate Winslet is reflecting on her first intimate experiences with women for the first time in an interview.
The acclaimed actress became a global superstar with the release of Titanic in 1997, but she first gained attention earlier with her film debut aged 19 in 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, followed by Sense and Sensibility in 1995.
Her role in Heavenly Creatures had a significant part in Winslet’s personal and professional life. The acclaimed film tells the story about two teenage girls as they create an elaborate fantasy world and plot to kill someone in order to stay together.
While looking back on her role in the film in a new interview, Winslet said the connections she formed with women as a teenager helped inspire the ‘really intense connection’ between her character—Juliet Hulme—and co-star Melanie Lynskey’s character, Pauline Parker.
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“I’ll share something I’ve never shared before. Some of my first intimate experiences as a young teen were actually with girls,” Winslet explained on an episode of Team Deakins podcast. “I’d kissed a few girls, and I’d kissed a few boys, but I wasn’t particularly evolved in either direction.”
“At that stage in my life, I certainly was curious, and I think there was something about the really intense connection that those two women had that I profoundly understood," Winslet added. "I was so immediately sucked into the vortex of that world they were in that obviously became horrendously damaging to both of them, and they had huge insecurities and vulnerabilities."
Winslet is married to businessman Edward Abel Smith, whom she wed in 2012.
She has three children: daughter Mia Honey Threapleton, 25, with first husband Jim Threapleton, son Joe Alfie Mendes, also known as Joe Anders, 22, with second husband Sam Mendes, and son Bear Blaze Winslet, 12, with her current husband, who is a businessman, non-fiction author, and producer.
The film is based on the notorious Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand, involving the 1954 murder of Honorah Rieper, Pauline Parker's mother. The 16-year-old and her 15-year-old close friend Juliet Hulme bludgeoned the woman to death with a brick in a sock during a walk in the park on June 22, 1954, as reported by NZ History.
The girls believed Honorah was an obstacle to their close bond and their shared fantasy world, deciding she had to be 'removed' to keep them together.
Both girls were found guilty of murder and sentenced to detention because they were minors at the time. They served about five years in separate prisons and changed their names and moved to the UK. They were ordered never to see or contact each other again.
