James Cameron has revealed that he was initially hesitant to cast Kate Winslet as the romantic lead in Titanic, saying that at the time he felt it was “lazy casting.”
Before Winslet, then 22, would go on to star opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the Oscar-winning director’s 1997 epic, she had mostly featured in period literary adaptions, including Sense and Sensibility (1995), Jude (1996) and Hamlet (1996).
She had been nicknamed Corset Kate, Cameron noted in a recent interview with Variety.
“It seemed like lazy casting,” he explained. “But then wiser heads prevailed, and I could see what everybody was talking about. She’s very alive. She comes into a room with a great deal of confidence, and she’s got that spark of life.”
Winslet went on to lead the film as Rose, a young aristocrat, who meets and falls in love with poor artist Jack (DiCaprio) aboard the ill-fated Titanic.
Titanic ended up winning 11 awards at the Oscars in 1998, including Best Picture, and Winslet became the youngest person to snatch six nominations at the ceremony.
The 48-year-old Winslet has since reflected on the international fame she gained from the role, calling the stardom “horrible.”
“I felt like I had to look a certain way, or be a certain thing, and because media intrusion was so significant at that time, my life was quite unpleasant,” she told Net-a-Porter in February.
“Journalists would always say, ‘After Titanic, you could have done anything and yet you chose to do these small things’… and I was like, ‘Yeah, you bet your f***in’ life I did!’” she added. “Because, guess what, being famous was horrible.’ I was grateful, of course. I was in my early twenties, and I was able to get a flat. But I didn’t want to be followed literally feeding the ducks.”
In 2023, Cameron revealed that he had to “twist” DiCaprio’s arm to co-lead Titanic. Recalling that DiCaprio didn’t want to be a “leading man,” because he thought it “was boring,” the Terminator director said the actor, who was 21 at the time, eventually “accepted the part” only after Cameron “convinced him” that the role was “actually a difficult challenge.”
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Following its theatrical release, Titanic became the highest-grossing film at the time, earning a whopping $600 million (£490 million) at the U.S. box office and $1.8 billion (£1.4 billion) worldwide.
More than two decades later, Winslet and Cameron teamed up again for his 2022 sci-fi Avatar: The Way of Water the first of several sequels in his Avatar franchise.
Winslet most recently starred as Chancellor Elena Vernham in Max’s satirical drama The Regime about the unraveling of a modern European authoritarian regime.