Kate Winslet’s Nude "Titanic" Portrait Haunts Her to This Day

Julie Miller

Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet

Let this be a lesson to young actresses everywhere: if a director asks you to pose topless for a romantic onscreen portrait-even if said portrait is being drawn by Leonardo DiCaprio himself-don't do it. Seventeen years after making that grave error on the set of Titanic, Kate Winslet confesses that she is still being haunted by the sketch of her bare body at every turn.

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Just this week, a fan was photographed shoving a sizable copy of the portrait at Winslet at the red-carpet premiere of her latest film, Divergent. When asked whether she signed the Titanic artifact afterward, Winslet revealed that she had not, although the awkward interaction is nothing new. "I don't sign that [picture]," the Oscar winner told Yahoo U.K. "It feels very uncomfortable. Why would you do that? [...] People ask me to sign that [picture] a lot."

In addition to being asked to sign the drawing, she's been asked to autograph a topless still of herself from the film that someone had the audacity to print out. "There's a photo of it, as well, that someone has lifted from a still of the film, and that photo gets passed around too. I'm like 'No! I didn't mean for it to be a photograph that I would end up seeing still 17 years later.'" Laughing, she added, "It's still haunting me. It's quite funny really."

And what do Winslet's two eldest children, Mia and Joe, think of the romantic epic that shot their mother to fame-racy portrait scene included? They probably haven't seen enough of the film to form an opinion. At the European premiere of Divergent, Winslet conceded that her older son and daughter had only made it through half of the three-hour-plus film.

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