Kate Winslet ‘Had To Learn the Hard Way’ To Turn Down Nude Scenes but Lee Celebrates Having Control

Kate Winslet knows all about perseverance. Whether it’s surviving the hard parts of being a woman in Hollywood or continuing to push the needle with her roles, Winslet’s career is a masterclass in not giving up.

When Winslet sat down with SheKnows to discuss her role as Vogue World War II photojournalist Lee Miller in Lee, it’s clear that the actress and her character have a lot in common when it comes to resilience and the fight for more control in male-dominated spaces.

“It was just staggering how I would unearth these just horrifying things that they had to go through,” Winslet, who spent five years researching and developing the film, before director Ellen Kuras was brought on, tells us.

“Particularly Lee as a woman, as a flawed middle-aged woman who got her way into those male dominated spaces, even when they kept trying to shut the door in her face and she just kept going.”

In one of many displays of strength, before heading to war, Miller is asked to write her own obituary. Winslet knows the task must have felt impossible, so much so that she can barely come up with an obituary of her own. “Oh! I don’t know! Lived life at full throttle?” Winslet offers. This life motto is something she also saw in Miller, who she felt willing her on during filming. “Don’t give up. That’s always been me. I’ve never taken no for an answer.”

Winslet learned a lot from Miller’s life and her sense of persistence which has been essential to both of their careers. “As women… it is more challenging for us,” Winslet says. “We need to live in a world where we make it less challenging.”

Not taking no for an answer has been an essential part of Miller and Winslet’s lives but, for Winslet, knowing when to say no has also been key to her time in Hollywood. When our conversation turns to Winslet’s topless scenes while playing the free-spirited model-turned-photographer, it’s clear that the actress was careful about when and why she included nudity in the film.

Age and experience has made Winslet more comfortable with nudity but also with turning it down. “I certainly have more of a capacity to say, ‘Well, is this really relevant? Do we really need that?’” she tells us. “I certainly had to kind of learn the hard way, I think, in terms of how to stand up for myself in those spaces which were often male-dominated, and I was really quite young.”

“I feel phenomenally impressed and proud when I see other young actresses now just sort of walking through the world in a much more vocal way in terms of what they’re okay with, and what they aren’t,” Winslet says of how Hollywood has changed. “I was one of the ones in the very beginning who was trying to sort of sift through the rubble of that to find the right words to say, ‘Oh, I’m not sure.’ And it was much harder for girls to put their foot down than it was for the guys, of course.”

Watch the exclusive video to see how Winslet and the team approached nude scenes in Lee, and what they made sure never to do in the film. Lee is in theaters now.

Before you go, click here to see actors who have spoken out about pressure to get naked for a role.