A feeling of belonging

Hollywood diaries

Kate Beckinsale looks every inch the movie star. Teeth, bright white; tan, perfect; hair, dark, fulsome and tucked up behind her head. Normal 42-year-olds do not look like this. And yet, one has to remind oneself that Kate is not from the Hollywood production line. “I remember someone saying to me that if you’ve lived for 5 years away from where you came from you’re never completely at home anywhere and I do feel a bit like that,” she says, wistfully.

“I’m familiar now with Los Angeles and America, but I still feel 100% a foreigner here, and then I go back to London and I don’t feel completely un-foreign there. I feel intensely old when I get there.” Despite her feelings of dislocation when she visits these shores, Kate is still very English, with a self-deprecating sense of humour and an accent that belies her private schooling.

Her latest role, as a scheming widow in a Jane Austen adaptation called Love & Friendship, proves the point. “It felt familiar,” she admits. “It’s back to what I originally started out doing, because when I started acting if it wasn’t Shakespeare or Chekhov or Henry James or some kind of period thing then I wasn’t doing anything else.”

In fact, it was a role in Much Ado About Nothing that set her on her path to stardom. Kate dropped out of Oxford to play Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play in 1992. Television parts in Cold Comfort Farm and Jane Austen’s Emma followed.

But her segue into mainstream Hollywood came at the end of the 1990s when she was cast as Evelyn, the love interest of both Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck in the overblown blockbuster Pearl Harbor.

Since then, she has co-starred with Hugh Jackman in the horror thriller Van Helsing, played Ava Gardner opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the Oscar-nominated Aviator and built up a huge cult following via the Underworld action films, in which she plays the ice-cool vampire Selene.

But, while these films have certainly made her a global star and paid her well, one has always suspected Kate, who is the daughter of the late comic actor Richard Beckinsale, hankered after more cerebral roles.

And in the witty Love & Friendship, she may have found one. An adaptation of Lady Susan, a little-known unfinished novella by Jane Austen, the film is about an unscrupulous widow who takes up residence at her in-laws’ country estate, with the intention of securing her financial future by marrying her sister-in-law’s handsome younger brother. Her plans are thrown into disarray, however, by the surprise arrival of her daughter, who has just run away from school. 

“I’m fairly familiar with Jane Austen and I think she’s so incredibly insightful and funny but I didn’t realise she had such a naughty streak,” says Kate. “I hadn’t seen such a broad kind of feministy heroine who is terrible and diabolical and cruel. Yet she’s also functioning within the constraints that existed at that time for women. Her big concern is her future security.”

Kate herself is also alive to the constraints placed upon women today, arguing there is “an innate sexism” in the film industry. “I think women, whether they are managers, agents, actors or directors, are used to having to filter their opinions in a way that doesn’t seem combative or that’s palatable in a way I don’t think men have to,” she says. “You rarely hear a man described as ‘difficult’, which a woman is if she has an opinion that is not popular.”

The actor made her stage debut in The Seagull in 1995 and went on to appear in the London stage productions of Sweethearts and Clocks, but, she says, “I’ve not done theatre since my daughter Lily was born because I’ve always thought bedtime to be an important time. But now she’d be appalled if I tried to put her to bed, so being able to do other things is pretty exciting.”

Beckinsale has 2 more films in the can: the psychological thriller The Disappointments Room and the 5th instalment of the Underworld franchise, Underworld: Blood Wars. But she has also bought the film rights for a novel, The Chocolate Money, which she is in the process of adapting for the screen, and it is this, you sense, that is her real passion project.

“I’m happy with my career. I’ve been really enjoying the work I’ve been doing and I’m really enjoying writing. And, you know, this different stage of being a mother is a whole new set of skills, so I feel pretty excited about everything, to be honest.”