Kate Winslet has revealed she ‘refused to cover up her belly rolls’ after a crew member told her to during filming for her latest film Lee. 

The Oscar-winning actress, 48, opened up about the incident as she embraced her natural beauty while posing topless in the sea for her recent shoot with Harper’s Bazaar.

The star plays model-turned-WWII-photographer Lee Miller in the biopic, adapted from 1985 biography The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose.

However during filming Kate revealed a member of the crew suggested she sit up straighter to hide her rolls.

Speaking to the magazine Kate explained: ‘There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini… And one of the crew came up between takes and said: “You might want to sit up straighter.”

‘So you can’t see my belly rolls? Not on your life! It was deliberate, you know?’

She also admitted she doesn’t mind looking less-than-perfect on screen as she explained: ‘The opposite. I take pride in it because it is my life on my face, and that matters. It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up.’

Kate starred in arguably one of cinema’s most iconic nude scenes of all time in 1997’s Titanic while playing Rose, where she reclined on a sofa and asked love interest Jack – played by Leonardo DiCaprio – to ‘paint her like one of his French girls’.

Meanwhile while filming a sex scene for Mare Of Easttown back in 2021, Kate wanted her character to be portrayed as ‘a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age.’

‘I think we’re starved of that a bit,’ she said of the scarcity of unfiltered and realistic female bodies on film and television during an interview with the New York Times.

While acknowledging her ‘unglamorous’ appearance in the show may be surprising to some viewers, she said she turned down director Craig Zobel’s offer to edit out ‘a bulgy bit of belly.’

‘Don’t you dare,’ she recalled telling him after he assured her the angle wouldn’t air.

Additionally, she raised eyebrows for sending back the series’ promo poster twice ‘because it was too retouched’ and she knows how ‘many lines’ she really has by the sides of her eyes.

The star will celebrate her 50th birthday next year but is very comfortable in her own skin and with her inner confidence.

She told Harper’s Bazaar: ‘I do feel a huge sense of relief that women are so much more accepting of themselves and refusing to be judged.

‘Because I don’t know a single contemporary of mine who grew up seeing her mother looking in the mirror and saying: “I look nice!” My mother never did: it was always, “oh God, I don’t think I can wear this, do I look hippy, does my bum look big?”

‘We waste so much time being down on ourselves and I’m just not doing it ever again.’

She added: ‘I think people know better than to say, “You might wanna do something about those wrinkles”.

‘I’m more comfortable in myself as each year passes. It enables me to allow the opinions of others to evaporate.’

Kate was catapulted into the limelight when she was just 20-years-old after she starred in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility in 1995.

The young actress won an Academy Award nomination for her best supporting actress in her role as Marianne Dashwood.

Speaking about the media bullying and intrusion she faced in the early years of her career she said: ‘There was a lot of bullying of me that went on in the media, and that did get to me.

‘Look at all those years in my twenties when I was all sorts of different shapes and sizes.’

Discussing her forthcoming 50th birthday she said: ‘I don’t like big parties, and I can’t stand surprises.

‘And I want to spend the year doing 50 remarkable things, whether that’s a particular hike I’ve never done, or a place I’ve never been, acts of kindness – I’m gathering a little list.’

The September issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK is on sale from 08 August