Kate Winslet has opened up about her struggles with body confidence.
The Oscar-winning actress revealed how a stray comment from her longtime friend Leonardo DiCaprio changed the way she thought about her body forever.
Winslet and DiCaprio have been friends ever since their days playing on-screen lovers Jack and Rose in Titanic. While the pair have never been romantically involved in real life, they've always looked out for each other.
When talking about her time filming Titanic with DiCaprio, Winslet revealed to Oprah Winfrey how a comment he made about her body stayed with her forever.
"I remember Leo when we were doing Titanic saying to me, 'it's really important that you are the shape that you are,'" the star recalled.
"I was like, 'what do you mean by that?' He said, 'because there are so many skinny girls out there who think that to be successful and to be beautiful and therefore to be loved and respected it means you have to be thin,'" she added.
The Mare of Eastown star went on to say how DiCaprio's words resonated with her, saying: "This really struck a chord with me and I thought, 'God, he's really right. In some way, this image is being translated to teenage girls.'"
When the Oscars rolled around and Winslet's performance generated considerable buzz, the actress remembered her friend's words and realized that she had every reason to be confident in her own body.
"I thought, 'I'm young, I'm 21-years-old and I'm in this movie and it's very successful and I've been nominated for an academy award for this and I haven't don any of this through being skinny or through starving myself'. So I thought, 'I'm just going to hold my head high and be the person that I am,'" the actress told Oprah proudly.
Winslet has spoken often about the body shaming and abuse she experienced throughout her youth.
In an interview with The Guardian, she recalled that "it was almost laughable how shocking, how critical, how straight-up cruel tabloid journalists were to me."
"They would comment on my size, they’d estimate what I weighed, they’d print the supposed diet I was on. It was critical and horrible and so upsetting to read," she added.
