Kate Winslet on why Hollywood struggles to portray strong women | 60 Minutes

Despite an Oscar and two Emmys to her name, Kate Winslet still felt like she wasn’t cut out to play the lead in the first movie she was going to produce.

“When I was doing ‘Lee,’ I would sit there and I would say, ‘this is ridiculous. This, I can truly think of at least five other brilliant actresses who would have played this part much better than me. Like a lot better,'” Winslet said. 

That role that gave Winslet so much angst was that of American photographer Lee Miller — one of the few female journalists on the front lines of World War II. Miller captured some of the most haunting images from the war, including some of the first uses of napalm and Nazi concentration camps. 

Fighting to bring “Lee” to the screen

Winslet said she knew it wouldn’t be an easy sell in Hollywood. 

“There was one potential investor who said to me, ‘why should I like this woman?’ I mean, she’s drunk, she’s, you know, she’s like loud. She, I mean, he just probably stopped short of saying she has wrinkles on her face,” Winslet said.

She said one director told her that if she starred in his film, he would get her “little” “Lee” made. 

The actor didn’t make the movie with those men. Instead, she insisted on bringing in a female director, co-producer and writers. Winslet was intimately involved in every step of the production. 

Winslet spent years visiting Miller’s estate in the English countryside, where the photographer lived with her husband, a British painter. 

With the help of Miller’s son, Winslet scoured the archives. She decided to focus the film not on Miller’s history as a model who had many lovers, but on her time as a war photographer. 

To tell the story, Winslet enlisted a historian to make an exact replica of Miller’s camera, and really took pictures while she was acting. 

“It couldn’t just be a prop,” Winslet said. “It needed to feel like an extension of my arms. I had to be confident and comfortable with it. And in order to do that, I had to know what I was doing.”

From making sandwiches to making movies

Winslet grew up in Reading, a working class town just outside of London, as the second of four children. Her father was a struggling actor who often gave his daughter the advice she…