It always dawns on you late but that doesn’t mean it hurts you less. It hurts a lot because you haven’t spoken up and you live with that trauma feeling like a fool, helpless and abused. That is how Kate Winslet felt when she recollected her salad days in Hollywood. “It’s like, what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?” Winslet tells one magazine it’s disgraceful that Hollywood held the two controversial filmmakers in high regard for so long who are accused of abusing teen girls.
Winslet herself has experienced harassment on film sets, starting with her breakout role in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures.” The actress recalled the filming of an intimate scene where she and co-star Melanie Lynskey were naked from the waist up and one of the camera boys said to someone else, “Well, I guess it’s hard-dicks day, boys.”
“I was like, ‘Uh,’ but I did this weird thing that you do when you’re younger of just going, ‘Well, that wasn’t very nice, but we’d better not say anything,’” Winslet said. “And so I just carried on. I must have sort of buried it, because I had forgotten. But now it’s crystal clear. I can actually remember what the guy looked like. I remember his name, and he really was a nice guy, but when you’re younger, you do this nonsense thing of just thinking, ‘That’s what men say.’ And they do it sometimes like they’re breathing. I don’t know a single girl, actually, who hasn’t experienced some level of harassment on that level. Even if they’re just words, they’re so powerful. It’s like bullying.”
