London, October22: Much has been said about Kate Winslet’s extraordinary bravery when Richard Branson’s Necker Island home burned down during a tropical hurricane.
But now the modest actress, 36, has revealed some unexpected details about the fateful August night.
Bizarrely the star’s first thought was not of action, but her underwear.
Speaking on The Graham Norton Show, Kate said: ‘It was genuinely very scary. We woke up at 4:30 in the morning to yelling that there was a fire,’
‘I jumped up and ran immediately towards the fire but then realized we might die,’ she continued.
‘So I turned around, told my children to go in and shut the door and then thought, “Now what do I do?”‘
Kate’s well-documented next move was to carry her host’s 90-year-old mother down the stairs and away from the inferno.
However the star has now said that there was one thing she thought of first.
‘I ran into the bedroom and put on a bra,’ she divulged. ‘In disastrous moments like that, you do the strangest things.’
‘I started to put on a bra and thought ‘No, that’s going to take me too long,’ so off came the bra, on came the t-shirt, I grabbed the children and I picked up Granny’
‘No, I didn’t save her life,’ she said. ‘I carried her down the stairs is the truth of it.’
‘We were all at the top of some very slippery stone steps and in the middle of a hurricane – it was so dramatic, there was lashing rain and it really did feel like being in a movie. In truth, I carried Eve Branson down the stairs,’ Kate explained.
‘I have to say Eve Branson is an extraordinary stoic, powerful lady and she could have totally made it out on her own,’ she added. ‘I just helped that tiny little bit.’
Thankfully Kate and children Mia, 10, and Joe, 7, escaped unharmed from the blaze, along with 16 other guests from the eight-bedroom Great House on Necker, Branson’s private island in the British Virgin Islands.