Kate Winslet, 47, opened up about dying her hair for the movie that made her a household name! The British-born actress traded in her blonde hair for red to play Rose in Titanic, which earned her an Oscar nomination — but it turns out the shade was hard to get rid of! Kate confessed that it took “almost two years” to get back to her natural blonde in a new interview for ELLE magazine‘s “Legends Only” series.
“My hair isn’t naturally wavy, so it had to be curled every day and was impossible to maintain because there was water all around us,” the Mare Of Easttown star remembered of filming Titanic, which co-starred Leonardo DiCaprio as her love interest Jack. After an intense romance aboard the ship, Jack sadly dies in the freezing water after the massive boat sinks. “We were filming in a series of tanks, so the water was always in the air, and it would create a problem for everybody’s hair,” she continued.
It turns out, the iconic character wasn’t even supposed to have red hair: writer and director James Cameron, 66, thought of the addition after meeting Kate. “Rose was never described as having red hair, and I remember the first conversation with Jim Cameron about her hair color,” she reflected. “He asked, ‘How would you feel if we did something really bold with her hair?’ He wanted it to be red, but an intense, unusual red, and I was very excited about that,” she explained. While we love Kate as a blonde, the spicy shade certainly fit the vibe of Titanic, which was set in 1912.
It turns out Titanic didn’t put Kate off from dying her hair again: during quarantine, the actress — who is mom to kids Mia, 20, Joe, 17, and Bear, 7 — revealed she colored her own hair twice! “What’s great about L’Oréal’s Préferénce is that it’s hard to go wrong because the color works so well,” the L’Oréal Paris Global Ambassador said to British Vogue, adding that she’s shade 9.1. “I did color my own hair twice during lockdown last year – just a little bit through the top because my own hair is a brown color. Too much root and I just look really tired. It went well and it’s easy to follow the instructions.,” she added.
“My son and his friends are also constantly wanting to change their hair color so I often find that if he has them round, they’ll be like ‘Mum, can we dye Jake’s hair purple?’ I’m terrible and tell them to phone their mums to check if it’s okay,” she hilariously said, pondering how she became the mom with all the “cool dye” at home. “That’s us and it’s partly because I have a daughter and she’s also always experimenting with hair colors and realizing she bought the wrong one, so my son gets her cast offs,” she quipped.