Daily Record

I WAS A WRECK ON THE TITANIC

November 21, 1997

By Douglas Thompson

Brit babe Kate Winslet confessed she was a wreck on the set of the blockbuster Titanic.

For the stunning actress had to squeeze into a corset - and the tight fit was not an uplifting experience.

The 22-year-old actress stars in the dollars 250 million epic which recreates the tragic maiden voyage of the luxury liner in 1912.

She said: "I've had to suffer for my art. My two top rib bones on one side stick out more than the other side. It's bloody horrible.

"Corsets do constrict your internal organs and when you take them off, my God, are you skinny.

"Then, after a few hours, it all flops back again."

The corset wasn't the only bad experience for Kate on the movie, in which she stars with heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio. She said: "I was plunged into freezing water - I was glad I'd trained for the swimming sequences."

Kate also suffered a chipped elbow and gashed her knee making the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

She said: "Some days I'd wake up and think `please God, don't let me die'."

Kate's run of bad luck continued this week when she was rushed to hospital with a virus and missed the film's London premiere. Titanic opens nationwide in January.

But she knows she can't complain about every mishap and accident on set because she had begged director James Cameron - who helmed that other water-based movie The Abyss - to give her the part.

She said: "I called James - I think he was in his car on the Los Angeles freeway - and said `you don't understand ... I have to do this film. You cannot possibly cast anyone else'.

"He told me the film would be brutally hard and even dangerous and I shouted `let's go for it'."

Cameron was impressed and his wife, actress Linda Hamilton - who starred in his Terminator movies - even offered Kate the services of a personal trainer.

Reading-born Kate politely declined and explained: "The woman I play is upper class. They never lifted anything. They even had someone to help them dress."

Kate's character Rose enjoys an upstairs/downstairs love affair with Leonardo DiCaprio's poor artist, Jack.

She said: "Leo's a young artist from Paris and I am Rose, an upper-class girl

"I meet his world and he meets mine. Then, for the second half of the film, the ship starts sinking and it's chaos."

The extravagant budget paid for for digital wizardry yet the success of the movie depends on the chemistry between the two young leads.

And Kate thinks the tragic story of the doomed liner will strike a chord with movie fans.

She said: "The story is so terribly moving. I was in floods of tears when I first read the script. With all the special effects, it was our job to create something so honest that it can draw anyone in.

"I don't know whether I'm believable or not - but I felt it.

"I'd never done a movie like it. "You've got to keep a sense of yourself and character at all times and not concentrate on the wild madness that's going on around you."

Some of that wild madness involved actor Bill Paxton - star of the hit disaster movie Twister - and 50 crew members who all needed emergency medical treatment after their lobster soup was spiked by the dangerous street drug PCP. Then three stuntmen brokebones when they fell out of harnesses during sinking sequences.

But it was the sheer cost of the film which has aroused most controversy.

At dollars 250 million, it is the most expensive movie ever made - Cameron even handed back his dollars 20 million fee as the budget spiralled out of control.

Costly budgets seem to be a feature of films about the liner.

When Lew Grade's Raise the Titanic bombed at the box office in 1979, the movie mogul was heard to remark that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.

The money was spent on building an almost life-size, five-storey replica of the liner and creating of the world's tallest soundstage and biggest open air water tank in Mexico.

It will have to make dollars 500 million to make a profit - and Hollywood moguls are using Titanic as a gauge of how future epic movies will be, in scope, size ... and budget.

Source: Daily Record