Kate Beckinsale: No fear of flying

Kate Beckinsale looks serious as she confesses to a period of self-evaluation. Cocking her head, she almost whispers: "I'm in a funny year, as I am the age my father was when he died, and my daughter is the age I was then. I think it is completely inevitable for me to have a bit of a review at this point, in the spiritual sense."

Kate Beckinsale looks serious as she confesses to a period of self-evaluation. Cocking her head, she almost whispers: "I'm in a funny year, as I am the age my father was when he died, and my daughter is the age I was then. I think it is completely inevitable for me to have a bit of a review at this point, in the spiritual sense."

Beckinsale, the mother of five-year-old Lily (from her relationship with the Welsh actor Michael Sheen), is all too aware of being known as the daughter of the late sitcom star Richard Beckinsale, (Porridge, Rising Damp), who died of a heart attack at just 31 years of age.

"The thing about it is that you're not normally in front of loads of people when you're going, 'Oh, what should I do about the next bit?' I may end up carrying on acting. I really don't know; I'm going to take each day as it comes and see who I turn into. I'm incredibly happy and I can't complain, but being British, we tend to dwell, don't we?"

One might expect the petite brunette, who battled anorexia in her teens, to be insufferably dramatic and precious like so many of her Tinseltown counterparts (most of whom have far less reason to be). But she seems grounded and unpretentious, even with no publicist there to watch her words. It's easy to warm to the sharp-witted Beckinsale.

Coming into the Beverly Hills hotel suite for our interview, she'd looked every inch the movie star: all long, lean limbs, flowing raven hair and doe eyes, in heels, pin-striped tailored trousers and a flattering black halter-top. The chocolate-box prettiness is all on show, as are the sultry brown eyes and creamy skin.

The topic is Martin Scorsese's film The Aviator, which tells the story of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio). Beckinsale gained 20 pounds (eating chocolate round the clock, she reveals) to portray the curvaceous silver-screen siren Ava Gardner, who (according to Gardner's memoirs) enjoyed a 22-year "platonic" relationship with the mogul.

Since marrying her Underworld director, Len Wiseman, in May, the actress divides her time between homes in London and Los Angeles. In her 13-year career, she has beefed up her résumé with a bevy of character-driven roles; in Cold Comfort Farm, the TV version of Emma, Serendipity (with John Cusack) and Laurel Canyon, in which she shared a screen kiss with her co-star Frances McDormand.

Yet, for all her charm and openness, Beckinsale retains a whiff of prissiness, which might have more to do with her private schooling and Oxford education (she studied French and Russian) than with her chosen career. "I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini-wax. See what Hollywood does to you?" She's only partly joking.

Beckinsale is confident in those areas of her life that don't rely on the stroke of genetic luck that gave her her looks. As a teenager, she won the WH Smith young writers competition for poetry.

Yet she's still forced to endure the kind of newspaper tattle that must be irksome. "Apparently, I get facials and manicures all the time. I read this and think, 'Oh, I wish I did that!' I don't think I've had a facial since I was 19. When I shave my legs, I use my child's shampoo and a razor - if I can find one. If I did everything they said I did, I would never see Lily."

When Beckinsale was nine, her mother, the television actress Judy Loe, moved in with (and later married), the director Roy Battersby, who had four teenage boys of his own. Despite initial horror, she soon settled in and her stepbrothers taught her to smoke cigarettes and swear. She acted in school plays and, after some small parts in British television dramas, landed the role of Hero in the Kenneth Branagh-directed Much Ado About Nothing (1993). Films such as Shooting Fish and The Last Days of Disco followed.

Hollywood beckoned, but she was hesitant. "I couldn't have handled it when I was 19. I've always been such a late bloomer. All of my friends were kissing boys and drinking cider way before me. I found it really depressing that we weren't making camp fires and everyone was doing grown-up stuff, which I didn't really like.

"I think, at 19, I was very grown-up in certain ways and extremely not so in others. If I had come on to a movie set at that age and someone had said, 'You're a bit funny-looking, can you go on a diet?' - I might have jumped off a building. I just didn't have the confidence to put that into perspective at the time."

Her first taste of big-budget epics came when the producer and director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys) cast her as Evelyn, the love interest of both Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck in the overhyped Pearl Harbor (2001). Bay, who admitted that he hadn't even heard of the British actress at the time, said: "Pearl Harbor cost a tremendous amount, so we had no money for a star. We felt the movie was the star.

"We scoured Canada, New Zealand, America for Evelyn - and we finally found Kate in England. I wasn't sure about her at first, but she wore black leather trousers in her screen test and I thought she was a little nasty. This movie is about a love triangle, and it was easy to think of this woman as a slut."

Beckinsale had lost the 70 pounds she gained while pregnant with Lily, and had headed to Los Angeles as soon as she finished filming the Merchant Ivory drama The Golden Bowl. "When I got Pearl Harbor, I naively thought I'd perform in this as if it was being staged at a small theatre in Wales," she says with a grin. "I had no idea what a 'Michael Bay movie' entailed, but I liked the script."

In true Tinseltown fashion, Bay insisted that Beckinsale be given a tan and a trainer. He teasingly said at the time: "For her first scene, Kate had to come out of the ocean and kiss Josh Hartnett, and here emerges this pale Englishwoman who had never been in salt water. I would say, 'Kate, when you come of the ocean, you don't spit out the water!'" Although the film was panned and declared a commercial flop, it did make money - and it certainly boosted the profile of the little-known and rather pale actress from Britain.

Asked about the differences between working on Hollywood and British film sets, Beckinsale simply rolls her eyes. "Oh, it's a much more cosy feeling on a set at home," she says. "I do think the whole industry has definitely changed over the last decade. I remember the first time I had a call from a publicist in America. She rang and said, 'Hello, I'm calling from LA, and I'd like to be your publicist.' And I just started laughing. 'Okay, so what's your job then? And why do I need one of those again?'"

Beckinsale quickly turns around to check there's no publicist tapping her foot behind her (there isn't) before continuing: "'Yes, and we charge several thousand dollars a month.' And I was like, 'You know this is not going to take off in England.'

"But it has! Even the pampering has changed," she says. "I look at how Keira Knightley is coiffed when she attends events. I remember going to Cannes with Much Ado About Nothing when I was 18, and nobody told me, 'Oh, here's a make-up artist or, 'This person wants to dress you, what clothes are you wearing?' It just wasn't like that when I started. Nobody even told me I could bring a friend! I just sort of showed up in a very expensive pair of trousers I bought in Harvey Nichols, and something I bought in the Sock Shop at the airport. But Keira Knightley has like full hair and make-up and a proper outfit and I think, 'Wow, she's not going to have the before photos I had to endure!' She's really lucky."

Beckinsale remembers as if it were yesterday the call from "her people" who informed her that the great Scorsese wanted her to do a screen test for The Aviator.

"I was in the middle of shooting in front of a green screen for Van Helsing when I got a phone message saying, 'Martin Scorsese's in town tomorrow, can you convincingly be Ava Gardner, do scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio; need American accent; bye.' You want six weeks to prepare for that kind of opportunity so as not make a fool of yourself. I just locked myself in a room with the script and her old movies. I was really dreading it, because aside from this particular part, you don't want Scorsese to go, 'Well, I've met her and she wasn't any good!'" Beckinsale says dryly.

DiCaprio spent seven years developing the life story of Howard Hughes with the co-producer Michael Mann. (Scorsese stepped in as director when Mann passed it up due to workload.) The Aviator, which focuses primarily on Hughes's early years as an aviation tycoon and movie mogul rather than his decline into reclusive eccentricity, also stars Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow and Alan Alda as Senator Ralph Owen Brewster.

Beckinsale admits she was a little ashamed at knowing only of Hughes's downfall - the long toe-nails, and so on - but realises now that the man was an iconic American with innovative vision. "Like most English people, because we tend to dwell on people's shortcomings, I knew that he was this eccentric billionaire who went crazy and wouldn't sit on someone else's toilet. But, my God, he was amazing, and masterminded so much. Just the sheer technical stuff he pulled off in movies at that time."

As with many actresses in Los Angeles, Beckinsale has fallen prey to speculation about indulging in cosmetic surgery. The rumour mill ran rampant recently after she wore a low-cut slinky cocktail dress to a Hollywood premiere - "secret breast augmentation", went the whispers.

A rather perturbed Beckinsale wants to make it clear that her breasts are all her own. "It all began when a journalist asked if I'd had a boob job," she says. "At the time, I thought it was funny, because I had put on 10lbs for my role in Van Helsing, and had been eating more chocolate to gain another 10lbs to play Ava. So, in fact, I was quite pleased that no one had actually noticed I was looking heavier.

"But then the rumour got a bit out of hand, and all of a sudden they said I was having Botox injections and a facelift and it felt like everyone was discussing my breasts!" Her eyes widen as she continues: "I was upset because I was having my worth as a mother assessed, but I've reached a point now where I'm kind of doing some evaluation - is this what I want to be doing? Do I want to have these particular stresses in my life?"

Beckinsale sighs. "It does kind of chip away at you a little bit, but making a movie like this very much helps because you realise that this is why I'm putting up with that stuff. It's a trade-off. Okay, fine, you can say I'm a lesbian or I've had a boob job. None of it's true."

'The Aviator' opens on Boxing Day in the West End of London, and on 7 January nationwide

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