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by Reena Daruwalla, guest writer for Nancy Hayssen.com

I have seen the movie Titanic, several times. I am fairly sure that is the case with a lot of people around the world. After all it is the highest grossing film of all time. An all out romantic love story, it catapulted its leading lady Kate Winslet into the limelight. What I find very interesting about Kate Winslet is her frank refusal to conform to a Hollywood ideal of thinness, in spite of the concentrated media attention on her size, her weight and her dimensions.

And curvy Kate has not had it easy; throughout her adolescence her weight was an issue for which she was at the receiving end of a lot of harassment. I read a very interesting anecdote about when she visited the make up department of a shop to find a sales assistant who was one of the people who had bullied her is school and after some pleasantries Kate told her how things were fine for her and – “I just wanted to say thanks for being such a bitch ‘cos you made me much, much stronger,” and just walked off. Bravo, wouldn’t you say! What a Hollywood moment!

The media has minutely documented any and all fluctuations in her weight over the years, but she has not felt the need to give into the pressure and lose weight to conform to the Hollywood ‘ideal’. There is another interesting story about her having posed for the British edition of the Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine when the magazine digitally altered her photos to make her look a lot thinner than she was in fact. Kate swiftly issued a statement saying that the alterations were made without her consent. GQ issued an apology in the subsequent issue.

Kate obviously believes in letting her work speak for herself, having been nominated for 5 Oscars and 5 Golden Globes, and being the youngest actress to have been nominated that many times. A talented, confident, stunningly beautiful woman; an inspiration !