Kate Winslet has revealed she once tried therapy – but quickly decided it wasn’t for her.

“I tried therapy once and thought, ‘Oh God, I could outsmart you, goodbye.’ So I won’t bother with that again,” she explained.

In an interview with The EDIT by Net-a-Porter, the 39-year-old added: “I’m quite good at [saying], get it all out, deal with it, move on.”

(Joel Ryan/AP)
(Joel Ryan/AP)

Kate, who has been acting since she was 16, is about to turn 40 – but insisted she is excited about the milestone as “confidence comes with age”.

The actress seduces 25-year-old Hunger Games star Liam Hemsworth in her new film The Dressmaker, and said the idea that women lose their looks as they age “baffled” her, adding: “Looking beautiful comes from the confidence someone has in themselves.”

Kate, who is also set to star in the film Steve Jobs as a marketing guru, said she wanted to challenge herself before entering her fifth decade.

“I feel like the past two years have been different for me, deliberately so,” she said.

“I really wanted to mix it up a bit and feel that I was going full pelt towards 40 having done as much as I could: pushed myself, challenged myself, exhausted myself, had as much fun as possible. The last two years of my life have put a different sort of rocket fuel up my backside.”

Looking back on her 20s, she admitted: “You can get away with having one too many vodka tonics, and you can wake up in the morning and not have a puffy face.

“I couldn’t go out now and get rip-roaring drunk; I’d take a week to recover and I value my life too much. Plus, I have children.”

Mother-of-three Kate also revealed that her 14-year-old daughter Mia would like to follow her mother into acting, which she said is “amazing”.

Kate Winslet with baby Mia in 2002
Kate Winslet with baby Mia in 2002 (Tim Ockenden/PA)

However, she confessed to some concerns: “If you let a child of 14, which Mia is, just go into that world with no support or explanation of what that world is – who these people are, what they do – they’re just wandering blindly.

“So my only real concern is that I would want to make sure she is learning things in the right order and being respectful of people around her.”

Steve Jobs is in cinemas on October 9. The Dressmaker is out on November 20.