The British actress played young aristocrat Rose, who falls in love with Leonardo DiCaprio’s working-class artist Jack, in James Cameron’s 1997 historical epic.
The movie went on to become one of the highest-grossing films ever made, and Winslet revealed in a recent interview with Variety that she found her sudden superstardom difficult to understand.
“Lately, I have found myself feeling comfortable saying I was not ready to be famous. I still had hardly been doing it. I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know what I was doing in the world, and I certainly didn’t know Hollywood. I was deeply fearful of it,” she explained. “All of these things that people assumed that I was, I was still grappling with. It’s not something that I feel comfortable necessarily saying out loud very often.”
While the role gave her some freedom in her career, the Oscar-winning actress believes that if Titanic were made now, she and co-star DiCaprio would be subjected to a different type of media frenzy.
“I was scared. I did things that made me feel I could cope. I had turned 21 on that shoot, and Leo turned 22. If that were happening now, I can’t imagine the extraordinary pressure because the media are no longer newspapers and magazines,” Winslet shared. “There’s something very terrifying and unknowable about the world of social media and the internet.
“If someone said something not nice about me, it was gone the next day. It was replaced by some other mean story about somebody else.”
