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Biography
It was only with her role alongside Ben
Affleck and Josh
Hartnett in the $130 million blockbuster Pearl Harbour that Kate
Beckinsale finally came to be regarded as a major screen actress and
personality in her own right - as opposed to the damaged daughter of a
famous father. Being smart, well-read and occasionally outspoken - much
like her screen heroines Geena Davis and Katherine Hepburn - she had
producer Jerry Bruckheimer say of her: "She has such subtlety and
style. She can switch to humour from high drama in a split second. She
reminds me of Meg Ryan some years back", while legendary director
John Schlesinger added that she has the "same combination of
freshness and intelligence" as the young Julie Christie. High
praise, hard earned.
As said, Kate took some time to emerge from the shadow of her father,
the much-beloved comic actor Richard Beckinsale, star of Rising Damp,
The Lovers and Porridge. Born on July 26th, 1973, she was only five when
he suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, leaving her to be raised by
her mother, the actress Judy Loe (Kate has a half-sister, Samantha
Beckinsale, herself an actress and star of London's Burning - they met
when very young, but not again till 1995). Yet, so popular was her dad,
and so shocked was the nation by his untimely death, that she would for
years be talked about as his tragic daughter, rather than her own
person.
Her bereavement affected her deeply. She describes herself then as
"a furious and passionate child" who went off the rails at
school. She was further disturbed at the age of nine when Loe began a
relationship with director Roy Battersby and moved in with him - Kate
now having to share her space with Battersby's daughter and four loud
sons. She remembers feeling "invaded", and hoping that her
mother would not remarry, though she now gladly acknowledges Battersby's
positive influence on her life.
Attending public school at Flexlands,
Godolphin and Latymer, she was a bright student, tomboyish and
encouraged to be foul-mouthed by Battersby, a working-class Londoner who
found it hilarious to hear a posh girl swear. But her fury at her
father's death gradually turned inwards, making her troubled and
withdrawn, with a paranoid fear of illness, till she reached breakdown
in the form of anorexia - anorexia, as she says, being "the mode of
nervous breakdown most available to teenage girls". By the age of
15, she weighed just five stone yet, with the support of Loe and
Battersby, and the aid of five years of Freudian analysis, eventually
recovered. Now she claims that anorexia and the learning process it
forced upon her were "the best thing that ever happened to
me".
Throughout this crisis, though, her passion and creativity were undimmed
(she proudly claims the same birthday as Jung, Aldous Huxley and George
Bernard Shaw). She won the prestigious WH Smith's Young Writers
competition two years running, once for her short stories, once for
poetry. And, having been asked all her life whether she would follow her
parents into acting, she decided that she would. She'd always enjoyed
theatre, once following The Rocky Horror Show round the country, all
togged up and hurling obscenities and tampons at the stage. Now, she
joined a youth theatre near her home in Chiswick, and began seeking
employment.
Parts came relatively quickly. Her first professional performance was a
small voiceover as the tormented Alice Mair in a TV adaptation of PD
James' Devices And Desires. There was Rachel's Dream, a 30-minute short
for Channel 4, concerned with environmentalism and capitalist
wickedness, in which she headlined along with Christopher Eccleston. And
the first big break, when she appeared in One Against The Wind, starring
Judy Davis and Sam Neill. Here Davis played a Red Cross worker helping
the Allies in Occupied France in WW2, with Beckinsale as her daughter,
engaging in a treacherous affair with a Nazi officer.
With all going so well, Kate considered enrolling in drama school, but
instead decided to widen her horizons by enrolling at New College,
Oxford, to study French and Russian Literature (this would also, she
reasoned, allow her to act in several different countries). Yet she
continued to act, joining in with student community theatre groups,
appearing notably in a presentation of Arthur Miller's A View From The
Bridge. And it was here that, having mostly kept away from boys, she
began her first serious affair, with fellow student actor Edmund
Moriarty - the pair first meeting when engaging in an increasingly
torrid onstage kiss.
Still pursuing professional roles,
Beckinsale had her ups and downs. One major down was missing out on the
part of Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Juliette Binoche at the last minute
nabbing the chance to haunt poor Ralph Fiennes. Yet there was also a
most excellent up (dude) when she passed an audition to play along Keanu
Reeves, Denzel
Washington and Emma Thompson in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About
Nothing, her first celluloid venture. Filming in Tuscany in the summer
break of 1992, she shared a villa with Reeves and Robert Sean Leonard,
but still managed to concentrate on work enough to avoid turning her
character, Hero, into the usual wimp. "I don't want to play drippy
women", she explained later "because I don't know any".
Somehow managing to maintain her studies, in the Easter holiday of 1993,
she went to Copenhagen to film Prince Of Jutland. Directed by Gabriel
Axel, of Babette's Feast fame, this was a retelling of Hamlet that
returned to the original Danish source material, and starred Gabriel
Byrne, Helen Mirren and Christian
Bale. Beckinsale worked again in the summer, filming Uncovered, a
now-hard-to-find thriller about a picture-restorer who accidentally
discovers a clue to an unsolved murder. She also appeared as main guest
in Headcase, the first episode of the Imogen Stubbs-starring crime
series Anna Lee.
Kate's third year of college was to be spent in Paris. She enjoyed her
freedom here, particularly the break from Oxford life which she now
found too empty and frivolous. But her acting career was now taking over
from academia. She won the lead in a French movie, Marie-Louise Ou La
Permission, and attempted to score the part of Flora Poste in a BBC
production of Cold Comfort Farm. Considered too young for the role, she
revealed her acumen and ambition by writing to director John Schlesinger,
asking to try out for him again when they were both in Paris. She
achieved her goal and, having left university early in the spring of
1994, found herself filming alongside Ian McKellan and Rufus Sewell by
late summer. Cold Comfort Farm was the BBC's standard-bearer on New
Year's Day, 1995 but, more importantly, when released to American art
cinemas the next year, it was an underground smash, grossing $5 million
and forcing a UK cinema release in 1997.
Meanwhile, Beckinsale was having a rough ride. Tired of playing young
innocents, she took the part of the mischievous and possibly malevolent
siren in Haunted. Directed by Lewis Gilbert, who'd helmed Alfie and
Educating Rita, and co-starring Aidan Quinn and Anthony Andrews, this
was a superior ghost story but Beckinsale - quite reasonably - had a
problem with the nudity and sex. Though originally a tiny part of the
screenplay, this exponentially expanded as shooting began. "I
despise that", she said later, just as she despised it at the time,
demanding the use of a body double.
Next would come Pearl Harbour, where she
took her first major starring role, as Ben
Affleck's lover, nurse Evelyn Johnson (she actually got the part
when Charlize
Theron pulled out to do Sweet November). For this she took no fee
from producers Disney, instead agreeing to a percentage of profits.
Quickly she moved on to rom-com Serendipity where, Christmas shopping in
New York City, she met and fell for John Cusack. Obsessed by Fate, she
wrote her details in a book and sold it, the assumption being that if
they were meant to be together Destiny would drop the book back into
Cusack's eager hands. Years later, when both are attached to others but
still bemoaning Destiny's tardiness, things begin to happen.
2002 would bring an onscreen lull as Beckinsale appeared only in Laurel
Canyon. Here she and Christian
Bale were Harvard lovers who move in with Bale's music producer and
sexually liberated mother, Frances McDormand, at the time working and
sleeping with Brit rock star Alessandro Nivola. This pervy pair then
decide to include a curious Kate in a sexy triangle, while Bale seeks
his kicks elsewhere. Other than this, Kate would be seen only in a Gap
ad called Denim Invasion, paired with Orlando
Bloom and directed by Cameron Crowe.
But seismic changes were on the way for Beckinsale. On the set of her
next picture, Underworld, she fell for director Len Wiseman and ended
her 7-year relationship with Michael Sheen (he'd go on to appear in
Bright Young Things, Timeline, and alongside Julianne
Moore and Pierce Brosnan in Laws Of Attraction). The tabloids were
incensed. Not only was Kate failing to behave like a traditional English
Rose, she appeared to be doing exactly what Kate Winslet had done when
achieving Hollywood success several years before. On top of this, Sheen
was actually IN Underworld.
During the press tour for the film, the
new couple were careful to say very little about the split. Instead they
purposefully promoted the movie, a crazy take on Romeo And Juliet in a
world where vampires battle endlessly against werewolves, Kate playing
the fearless vampire warrior Selene. Togged up in the tightest of rubber
cat-suits, her character's name just had to be a reference to Michelle
Pfeiffer's Selena Kyle/Catwoman in Batman Returns. The suit
certainly fitted her well - the film's poster would make her a bona fide
sex symbol before the movie was ever released.
With offers now pouring in, Beckinsale began to really mix it up. Her
next outing was in Tiptoes, a freaky romantic comedy where she played
the pregnant girlfriend of Matthew McConaughey. Given that McConaughey's
brother, Gary Oldman, is a dwarf, the couple at first fear that latent
genes might restrict their baby's size. Then, to complicate matters
further, Kate begins to fall for little Gary.
2004 would see her really hit the
heights. First she returned to the world of vampires in Van Helsing,
Stephen Sommers' big budget follow-up to the successful Mummy movies.
Here she played Anna, the genteel but tough sidekick to Hugh
Jackman's titular vampire hunter, joining in the mayhem as he visits
Eastern Europe to do wage war against Dracula, the Wolfman and
Frankenstein's Monster.
She'd back this up with her most
challenging role to date, playing Ava Gardner in The Aviator, Martin
Scorsese's long-awaited biopic of Howard Hughes, with Leonardo DiCaprio
in the title role. With Cate Blanchett taking on Katherine Hepburn,
another of Hughes' lovers, the onscreen competition would be fierce.
Many wondered whether the slight Beckinsale could ever match Gardner's
mighty charisma - the woman did, after all, torment Frank Sinatra so
intensely that he blubbed like a little girl and pretended to commit
suicide. Beckinsale was taking one of the biggest gambles in recent
screen history. Already a headlining star after Underworld, she would
now either win everlasting respect as a big-screen actress or be laughed
at for years. The girl certainly had guts.
Having married Len Wiseman in May, 2004, the couple immediately
continued their working relationship with a sequel to Underworld. As the
original had cost only $20 million, it was considered a fair hit, and
the sequel's budget was double. Showing the origins of the vampire and
werewolf species, and featuring the mighty thespian talents of Derek
Jacobi, it would be far more epic than its predecessor. With a
high-profile ad for Diet Coke also on show, Kate was now an undoubted
star.
And she's more. Smart and funny, she's still her father's daughter. But
now Richard Beckinsale is Kate Beckinsale's dad. ~ Dominic Wills
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