Only now, with
her role alongside Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett in the $130
million blockbuster Pearl Harbour, has Kate Beckinsale finally
come to be regarded as a fine 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's 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
adds 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
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making her troubled and withdrawn, with a paranoid fear of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.
Bored to distraction by the
mediocre screen roles offered to her, Kate took to the theatre.
She toured as Nina in a Thelma Holt production of Chekov's
The Seagull: did Sweetheart upstairs at the Royal Court: played
an aspiring actress with "a frozen soul" in Clocks
And Whistles at the Bush Theatre: and performed in Faithless
and The Proposal, the last being for BBC Radio 4. It was good
experience, AND he met her future husband, actor Michael Sheen
(they now have a daughter). She claims that on seeing him
for the first time she came over all "corny", dropping
all her pens. She returned to Tuscany with him when he appeared
alongside (coincidence!) Branagh in Othello - Sheen would
soon turn up with Julia Roberts in Mary Reilly, and enjoy
carnal knowledge of Stephen Fry in Wilde.
Now Kate returned to filmed
roles. She took on Jane Austen's Emma, receiving some poor
reviews because - quite rightly - she realised Emma Woodhouse
is an arrogant, interfering cow, far from Gwyneth Paltrow's
smarmy creation. Next she was good-hearted con artist Georgie
in Shooting Fish, third biggest British film of the year.
In spring 1997, she appeared as a reckless sprite in the video
to George Michael's duet with Toby Bourke, Waltz Away Dreaming,
then temporarily shifted her base to Los Angeles. In the States,
she quickly won a name for herself. First she was a selfish
young woman seeking romance and meaning in early Eighties
nightclubs in The Last Days Of Disco, for which she won a
London Film Critics Award. Then, along with Claire Danes in
Brokedown Palace, she was a high school grad framed for heroin
smuggling in Bangkok.
Aside from this, she played
an older Alice in Through The Looking Glass, and was tremendous
in Merchant-Ivory's return to form, The Golden Bowl, though
there were stories in the press that all was not well in the
filming of the latter. One alleged that Beckinsale feuded
with co-star Jeremy Northam and, when she once dropped a line,
he accused her of ruining his performance and followed her
to her caravan, yelling abuse till Michael Sheen had to hit
him. There was also a tape-version of Romeo And Juliet, wherein
Kate and Sheen publicly professed their love for one another
in the immortal words of The Bard. Ahhh.
And now there's Pearl Harbour,
where she takes 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. If general predictions prove to be
correct, the film will make her both a star and a very rich
woman. Smart and funny, she's still her father's daughter.
But now Richard Beckinsale is Kate Beckinsale's dad.
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