If you’ve ever had an embarrassing day at work, spare a thought for Kate Winslet, who has shared the “horrific” story of an incident that left her convinced she’d “totally shat myself” during a live peformance early on in her career.
On Friday night, the Oscar winner was a guest on Graham Norton’s BBC talk show, and freely disclosed to her fellow guests: “I nearly did a poo on stage once.”
After visibly wrestling with herself about whether to share the full story, Kate eventually relented, revealing it all began when she was performing in the farce What The Butler Saw as an 18-year-old.
“Oh my god, I’m actually going to tell this story,” the cringing Titanic star began.
Kate explained that her character had a scene in which she had to strip off in a doctor’s surgery for a physical examination, recalling: “In a normal situation, there’s a regular stage… with an audience [in front of you], so you’d go behind the curtain, take your clothes off, throw your things over and no one can see you.
“This theatre was in the round. So, little me… I go behind the curtain, take everything off, and I’m lying there, really kind of uncomfortably and awkwardly, and suddenly…”
At that moment, Kate began demonstratively fumbling, commenting: “It’s happening! It’s happening! It’s happening! Oh my god, I’m going to shit myself.”
To the shock and amusement of her fellow guests, she continued: “I’m lying on a white sheet! Naked! On a stage! So I’m like, ‘oh my god, happening, happening, happening now’.
“So I’m convinced I’ve totally shat myself on stage. And I think, ‘what am I going to do – in a minute I have to stand up, come out from behind the curtain, and look for all my clothes!’. And I’m like, ‘I’ve done a fucking poo! This is horrific!’.”
As the story unfolded, Kate joked she did “some kind of ninja flip move” to pick herself up while “binding the sheet all around myself”, all the while thinking she’d had a rather messy accident on stage “in front of an audience who can see me from every angle”.
Fortunately, once Kate managed to slither off stage, she discovered that she “had not actually done a poo”.
“But the second I got into my dressing room, and I ran into that bathroom… gunfire,” she concluded.
Surely a second Oscar is in the pipeline for that re-enactment alone?
Kate is currently on the promo trail for the new Avatar film The Way Of Water, for which she reunited with Titanic director James Cameron.
During recent interviews, she also spoke about having broken Tom Cruise’s world record for holding her breath while making Avatar, and recalled past directors’ hurtful comments about her appearance.