“I didn’t think the movie was going to be that big,” actress Kate Winslet shares on Zoom of the movie that launched her career (Titanic, maybe you’ve watched it about 20,000 times?). In the almost 25 years since, the actress has done pretty much everything and undergone a few ideal beauty transformations along the way.
We chatted about it while she sat in a cozy corner of her home on the south coast of England, as well as her new partnership with L’Oréal Paris. Her first campaign is for the Superior Preference Hair Color line, which looks happy after all the time we’ve been talking about hair dye.
Titanic, 1997
“Rose has never been described with red hair, and I recall the first discussion with [director] Jim Cameron about her color of hair. He asked, ‘How would you feel if we did something really daring thing with her hair?’ He wanted it to be red, but an intense and unusual red, and I was very excited about it. I hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to go back to my natural hair color after the shoot. It took almost two years.
The hair for this scene was particularly complicated as we had a pearl necklace woven into my hair. My hair is not naturally wavy so it had to be curled every day and was impossible to maintain as there was water all around us. We were shooting in a series of tanks, so the water was still in the air, and that would create a problem for everyone’s hair.”
Oscars, 2009
“For the red carpet, my favorite vibe is clean and simple. Jillian Dempsey did her makeup and Renato Campora took care of my hair. It was nerve-racking, and I kept thinking, ‘Oh my God, now I have to go to the Oscars like this.’ Jill did an amazing job covering it though.”
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Spirit, 2012
“Each of them is a wig. The movie was shot out of order, so sometimes my hair was red in the morning, then after lunch I would quickly turn blue. I liked them all. Having blue hair made me feel completely rebellious. Clementine even says: ‘I apply my personality in a paste.’ It’s so right.
I now own all the wigs and my kids try them on sometimes. The reason they look so real is that they all have a normal root. And the vibrant color was the yarn dye, not the hair dye.”
Oscars, 2016
“I do a lot of barre and yoga, so my arms are quite muscular and strong, and my acrobatics can actually be quite exploited. I chose a strapless dress for this red carpet, so if I had pulled my hair up, It would have exposed this little area that I’m embarrassed about. So Renato let go of my hair, which was a welcome change because I hadn’t done it for a long time.”
Easttown mare, 2021
“It’s shocking what you can do to change the person’s clothes and hair to match what you’re used to see. This shiny hair is a wig — plus, we added some makeup to put a little black on my face. Also if you look closely at the forehead you can see it’s a different shape. I’m not touching my eyebrows at all. They’re naturally arched. For ‘Mare,’ we added these tiny brow spots. This woman evolved them for me when I was doing The Reader. They’re like little eyelashes that you stick to your eyebrow, and they blend in completely and disappear.”
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