Kate Winslet: Women Should Be Proud to Have 'Rolls'

While filming her new movie Lee, a crew member suggested Kate Winslet sit up straighter at one point while filming a scene in a bikini. The actress was not into that advice. "So you can't see my belly rolls? Not on your life!" she tells Harper's Bazaar UK. To play Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, a fashion model who became a World War II photojournalist, Winslet deliberately stopped exercising so her body would look like Miller's. "She wasn't lifting weights or doing Pilates. She was eating cheese, bread, and drinking wine, and not making a big deal of it," Winslet tells the BBC.

But even had Winslet not made an intentional effort to soften up her body, she says women should be proud of "being a real shape, being soft and maybe having a few extra rolls." "We're so used to perhaps not necessarily seeing that and enjoying it," she adds. "The instinct weirdly is to see it and criticize it. It's interesting how much people do like labels for women." As the Guardian reports, Winslet insisted a woman direct Lee, which she co-produced. She ultimately chose cinematographer Ellen Kuras; the film, out September 27, is Kuras' directorial debut. (More Kate Winslet stories.)