In a matter of weeks Titanic star Kate Winslet will be a special guest at the Princess of Wales’s Together at Christmas carol concert, where she’ll perhaps come face-to-face with Catherine’s father-in-law King Charles. The actor and monarch have met before, and Kate’s first interaction with him almost thirty years ago was rather memorable.
She opened up about the experience on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on 18th November, explaining that she was just 20 at the time and was at the premiere of her 1996 film, Sense and Sensibility. Kate went for a daring sheer lace dress for this glamorous occasion and then realised she really was going to be meeting the then-Prince of Wales.
"The first time I met him, oh my goodness, he had come to support the premiere," she said, adding. "And I sort of hadn’t realised that we were really going to meet him, and so I forgot about the fact that I was wearing a kind of a transparent lace outfit."
Thankfully, Kate Winslet avoided possibly flashing the future King thanks to her decision to wear a long black coat over the top - and a timely reminder from someone else at the event.
"As he is making his way towards me, I’m like, 'Nipples, nipples, nipples, oh my God!' And someone just went, 'Coat!' and I went, 'Your Majesty!' basically covering myself in a cape," the actor confessed.
Pictures taken at the premiere show King Charles chatting animatedly with Kate’s Sense and Sensibility co-star, the late Alan Rickman, whilst she stood in the line ready to greet him with her trusty coat wrapped round her. Now, decades later, she’s a Hollywood icon with a new royal connection, having become an Ambassador for The King’s Foundation in June.
She met His Majesty once again at The King’s Foundation annual awards that month and volunteered to go first in curtseying to him, showing fellow A-lister Meryl Streep the ropes. The two had been in a "big panic" about what was required beforehand.
"Meryl and I, as we were walking to meet the King… she says to me, 'Do you think we have to curtsy?' I said, 'Absolutely, we have to curtsy.' She was like, 'Okay, is it a big curtsy? What do we do?' I said, 'I don't know, we'll just make the most,' and she was like, 'I don't know if we need to do that. There was a big panic because we didn't know what the form was."
Whilst curtseying to the monarch is always going to go down well as good manners, it’s not technically a requirement. A small curtsey is a traditional way for a woman to great a royal, whilst a bow from the neck is traditional for a man.
Yet even the Royal Family’s own website has confirmed that there are no "obligatory codes of behaviour" for meeting them. The royals do famously greet the monarch traditionally, with Meghan Markle sharing her surprise about this.
The Duchess of Sussex reflected in the Harry & Meghan Netflix series that she’d thought Harry was joking when he asked her if she knew how to curtsy before she met Queen Elizabeth.
“How do you explain that to people? How do you explain that you bow to your grandmother? And that you would need to curtsy, especially to an American. That’s weird,” the Prince said.
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