Kate Winslet Says First ‘Intimate’ Experiences as a Teen Were with Women: ‘I’d Kissed a Few Girls, and I’d Kissed a Few Boys’

Kate Winslet explored intimacy as a teenager with an open mind.

On the Dec. 24 episode of the Team Deakins podcast, the actress, 50, revealed that her “first intimate experiences” as a teen were “with girls.”

Reflecting on her role in Heavenly Creatures, which followed the star and Melanie Lynskey as two teens with an obsessive friendship, Winslet said the connections she had with women as a teenager helped inspire the “really intense connection” between her character and Lynskey’s.

“I’ll share something I’ve never shared before. Some of my first intimate experiences as a young teen were actually with girls,” she explained. “I’d kissed a few girls, and I’d kissed a few boys, but I wasn’t particularly evolved in either direction.”

“At that stage in my life, I certainly was curious, and I think there was something about the really intense connection that those two women had that I profoundly understood,” Winslet added. “I was so immediately sucked into the vortex of that world they were in that obviously became horrendously damaging to both of them, and they had huge insecurities and vulnerabilities.”

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Heavenly Creatures — released in 1994 and directed by Peter Jackson — was Winslet’s breakout role.

She would later go on to star in other big projects, including Sense and Sensibility and Hamlet, before she was thrust into international fame thanks to 1997’s Titanic, in which she starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio.

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Winslet recently made her directorial debut with the Christmas family drama Goodbye June, which is available to stream now on Netflix.

She also stars in the film, opposite an ensemble cast that includes Toni Collette, Johnny Flynn, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall and Helen Mirren.

Winslet is married to Edward Abel Smith. Together, they share a son, 12-year-old Bear Blaze, and the award-winning actress is also a mom to daughter Mia Threapleton, 25, whom she shares with ex-husband Jim Threapleton, and son Joe Mendes, 22, whom she shares with ex-husband Sam Mendes.

The Avatar: Fire and Ash star has been notoriously private about her Hollywood romances over the years.

She told WSJ. Magazine in September 2015, “No one really knows what has happened in my life. No one really knows why my first marriage didn’t last; no one knows why my second didn’t. And I’m proud of those silences.”

Speaking with The Sunday Times in 2021, Winslet opened up about relationships in the entertainment industry, particularly those among LGBTQ+ individuals, and how they fear for their careers if they were to come out publicly.

“I cannot tell you the number of young actors I know — some well known, some starting out — who are terrified their sexuality will be revealed and that it will stand in the way of their being cast in straight roles,” she said, adding that the situation is “f—– up.”