Kate Beckinsale — Twenty years ago absolutely fabulous

                              June 2001  By Philip Berk

Kate Beckinsale — the star that never was.

But that’s cruel, especially since she’s one of the most light hearted, fun loving, self aware, and unassuming actresses I’ve ever interviewed.

And she’s Burmese, if you please.

But more about that later.

True she’s appeared in a number of promising films that failed to live up to their expectations, not the least of which was last summer’s Pearl Harbor, which was supposed to do for her what Titanic did for another young  English actress.

But pay no heed, because she’s got a new movie about to open — Serendipity with John Cusack — which again isn’t very good, but if there’s any justice, her time will come.

Not that she hasn’t been blessed. Before Pearl Harbor there was Last Days of Disco, Brokedown Palace, and The Golden Bowl.

So what makes Kate so special? Well it’s her candor.

After the shocking death of her father (he was only 32) when she was six years old, her mother fell in love again, and the family suddenly became six, with a stepfather, two step brothers and a sister.

Let’s talk about that experience, I ask her.

Was it her brothers who encouraged her irreverence or is that something she gets from her late father who was a much loved and sorely missed British sit com actor (Richard Beckinsale) or even her mother, who I remind her allowed the kids to smoke marijuana? 

She protests that that comment was taken out of context but admits that her family were rather unorthodox.

“My mother met  my stepfather, who is a wonderful, intellectual, brilliant man when I was about nine. He had four sons and a daughter. Two of the boys lived with us a lot of the time. At the time I didn’t like boys at all. I preferred a horse or a dog. We roughed each other up a little bit,  but we’re very close now. I give a really great wedgie and I can spit quite a long way. My step father was working class London so he always thought it was funny to hear a posh girl say rude things occasionally. He probably encouraged it a little but not the way it was reported in London. My stepfather is very unpsychedelic.” 

But it was a rather liberal environment?

“I don’t know if it was all that liberal. Because my father had died very young, my mother and I were very close. I was always able to tell her things, and she treated me with a lot of respect, so certain things were not frowned upon. They weren’t encouraged, but they weren’t frowned upon. So whereas a lot of my peers rebelled against social conventions, I wasn’t  interested in doing the same. If I had wanted to rebel I’d have to become hugely right wing or something. I hope I have the same thing with my daughter and that she won’t feel the need to go out and have terrible secrets from me. The nice thing for  my mother was, she always knew what I was doing, where I was. Basically, I’m a pretty good, boring girl. I’ve been with the same partner since I was twenty one. If I drink coffee I have an anxiety attack, I’ve never been properly drunk in my life.”

So the quote in Interview magazine of her mom saying, ‘Okay, you kids can smoke pot in my house, but I’m not buying any more fucking cereal,” was a joke?

“Absolutely.”

Wasn’t it her mother who arranged for her to meet  Michael Sheen (her partner?)

“Not at all.”

So where did I get that impression?

“I was about to do my first play. I had done Much Ado About Nothing and a bunch of movies and I was asked to do The Seagull.  At the time Michael had just finished playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and was being feted as the greatest actor of his generation for his Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. I was nervous because I had never done a play before. I didn’t think anyone would be able to hear me. I wasn’t classically trained. And all this time my mother kept cutting out articles about him saying he was the greatest thing ever. I was unimpressed and thought, if we ever meet I would hate him.  But as soon as I saw him I knew I was done. I was like, ‘Oh, God, that’s finished. I’m not going to kiss anyone else ever again, and then I became an actress and kiss everybody all the time.” 

So it was love at first sight?

“As soon as he came in the room I knew exactly. And it was odd because we almost met twenty times before we actually did meet. Perhaps we weren’t ready for each other until that day. I believe there’s something guiding us along. I’m quite romantic in that way”

Ironically her new movie Serendipity is all about soul mates and destiny.

So what can she tell us about Michael?

“He’s an amazingly talented actor, and it’s very attractive to be with somebody who’s incredibly talented. He’s super intelligent, and what binds us together is we agree on all the big things. We’re very honest with each other, and that makes for a few arguments a week, but I think that’s healthy. He’s just started making movies. He’ll be  in Four Feathers with Heath Ledger and Kate Hudson coming out next year.”

How are their marriage plans progressing?

At the Pearl Harbor junket in Hawaii she told me, 

“I spent our first three years whenever there was a beautiful sunset asking him, ‘Is there something you want to say to me?’ And he would say, ‘Um I think the cat litter tray needs changing.”

So has she given up? 

“Actually I asked him just the other day. I must say the baby was a little bit of a surprise. I had just finished Brokedown Palace where I was supposed to be in a Bangkok jail. That whole getting out of prison thing can be potent, and  people quite often find themselves pregnant afterwards. Which is what happened to me. We were very pleased about it, but it wasn’t in our time scheme, and after going sleepless for a couple of years, any thought of table settings and napkins totally floored me. So we put it off a bit. 

“But I did ask him recently. I said, ‘People keep asking me why aren’t we married and he said, ‘Well, because every time I am about to propose, you do something annoying.’ I guess I haven’t been not annoying enough in so many years. However, two weeks in Hawaii, with both sets of grandparents to babysit, has helped very much. We were able to spend time together. I didn’t do anything irritating the entire holiday so I’ll keep you posted. He looks like he might. He looks like he’s brewing something. I just hope it isn’t gas.”

Has their relationship changed with the arrival of daughter Lily?

“I think Lily changed everything for the better. Having a child for me was a brilliant and wonderful and shocking thing. The first year you’re having a big love affair with your baby and your husband kind of gradually pulls you out of the bubble a little bit.  So we’re a lot closer and thank God we don’t have too many fights over parenting.”

What kind of father is he?

“He’s an amazing father. When we were in Hawaii for Pearl Harbor junket, he was there taking care of her.”

And is he romantic?

“He’s a good, proper Welshman. They have that Celtic kind of romance running through their veins constantly. Apparently it can shift into alcoholism, but it hasn’t so far. I remember getting really anxious once. I had drunk too much coffee and was convinced I was going to have a heart attack and die, and he promised me he would chase me into the Underworld and get me and bring me back. That’s the kind of man he is. I believed him. If anyone is capable of doing that it would be Michael.”  

Knowing that she earns more money than he does, wouldn’t that be an incentive for him to pop the question?

She doesn’t like the questions and she volunteers a curt “No.”

Changing the subject I ask her, 

What type of mother is she, is she overly protective?

“The amazing thing about motherhood is it teaches you to be less judgmental. I used to consider children on planes so annoying. Now I think, my God, you try having a two year old on an eleven hour flight!  It opens you up into becoming a more tolerant, understanding person. I’m protective of Lily, but I can’ stop her from having ordinary experiences like falling. If she falls over, I make sure she’s not hurt, but I don’t get all excited. She’ll jump right up and carry on. I don’t have her in kid gloves all the time.”

Is it true she’s part Burmese?

“I have a maternal grandfather who is Burmese. I only wish I had inherited from him the ability to really tan. But like my father I have very English genes on that score. He has devoted a lot of time to tracing the family history. When I was very young, he found out that a Burmese relative of his was a princess so I was so excited to go to school and say I was actually a princess. Later I learned there were a lot of princesses in Burma, and it wasn’t particularly special.”

Where did her proficiency in languages come from?

“It came out of my interest in theatre. I thought how wonderful it would be to act in different languages. So I studied Russian and French at the university. My first acting job in the theatre was as Nina in The Seagull, and the director was Georgian and didn’t speak any English. It’s great to be able to read Chekhov in the original because it’s very different. I also made a movie in French when I was living in Paris for a year. I find speaking a different language fantastic. I wish I had the opportunity to do it more.”

Does she keep it up?

“I try to and it’s amazing how quickly languages fall out  of your head, but it is also amazing how quickly when you’re in the country it comes back.” 

She played an American in Pearl Harbor. Did she have any problem with the accent?

“That was probably the fifth or sixth American accent I’ve done it, so I’m quite comfortable with it.”  

And her daughter, having spent so much time overseas, what kind of accent does she have?

“She’s only two and a half at the moment, but she has very much an English accent, with a lot of American phrases.”

Her well documented teen-age anorexia, how will she protect  Lily from those kind of problems?

“That condition was something I had for about a year when I was fifteen which has very little bearing on who I am now.  I had a lot of different things to deal with in my childhood and my daughter I’m sure will be no different.”

How was it cured?

“Four days a week of Freudian analysis.”

She once worked with a director who was so “cruel and horrible,”  she peed in his thermos because he had made her stand naked  for a scene that was later cut from the movie.

Since then she has a no-nudity clause in her contract.

Has she ever aggressively pursued a role?

“”One time I wrote a letter to John Schlesinger and poked it under his door. It was for Cold Comfort Farm, but you can’t do that too many times unless you want to be known as someone who pokes letters under people’s doors.”

What did she do to get  Pearl Harbor?

“I was living in New York at the time. I’d finished The Golden Bowl and had gone there because my husband (Freudian slip) was doing Amadeus on Broadway. I was just cleaning house, pureeing baby food, having  my mother around the corner, when I was sent a couple of scenes from the movie. They were very cagey, very secretive. I was asked to go to some secret New York address and do some scenes. I didn’t think anybody would see it, so I went back to England and no sooner was I there then they called and asked me to come to L.A. and test with Ben Affleck. By that time I had read entire script I was dying to do it.  So, I left the baby with my mother, jumped on a plane, and did my audition.”

And for the moment, is she doing anything?

“After working seven months in a row it was time for us, the baby and me, to take a little break. There wasn’t a project that I felt passionate enough in doing and my partner was doing Four Feathers so it was kind of his turn. After that we took our first vacation that we’ve ever had (in Hawaii.). So now I’m just putting my nose out the door.”

And how does she maintain her lithe figure?

“Well I wish you’d seen me when I was pregnant. I was enormous. After I had Lily, I believed the lie that nursing helps you lose weight, and I was very tormented when I didn’t lose one single pound for a long time. But when I stopped nursing it just kind of came off. For now when I’m not working, I make myself go to the gym now and again, but being English I don’t really like it.”

AND THREE YEARS LATER I WRITE

                                       By Philip Berk

Kate Beckinsale — still crazy after all these years.

There isn’t be a more goofy person to interview than Kate nor, despite her knowledge of five languages, a more muddled one.

But how can you complain when she’s always so disarmingly, refreshingly, candid.

If you asked her why she never married British stage actor Michael Sheen, the father of her five year old daughter, she’d tell you point blank, “Because he won’t have me.”

Even when asked a cheeky question she doesn’t bat an eyelash.

Maybe it’s because she’s lived such an unusual life.

She was only six when her father, a well-loved hugely popular TV personality  died suddenly at 32. Her mother remarried, a few years later, a left leaning intellectual with two sons and a daughter.

They all lived together as one happy irreverent family

Attracted to the arts, Kate quickly found success as an actress in England and  overnight fame when she was selected for the lead in Pearl Harbor. It never quite made her an international star but she continued to work intermittently, 

It was her role in Underworld, however, that resuscitated her career and actually changed the course of her life.

While filming she became attracted to the director Len Weisman, and by the end of production the two were deeply in love. 

A year later they married.

Kate now lives in Los Angeles, where the press junket for her latest film, Martin Scorsese’s eagerly awaited biography of Howard Hughes, The Aviator, is being held.

In the movie she plays one of Hughes’s many women, the screen icon Ava Gardner.

Not exactly ideal casting since Ava was dark and sultry.

Kate is light skinned and demure.

But obviously Scorsese saw a resemblance.

At her press conference she’s as unflappable as ever even when someone asks  what she would do if things didn’t work out for her in Hollywood? 

“In this industry,” she responds,”if you’re lucky you can get work that stimulates you intellectually. Sometimes you have pockets of time where your brain is not quite working as much as you might like. I’m giggly academic, really. So if that happens I’d be interested in writing, I could do theatre. I’ve always found the whole movie star thing very shocking and not really what I was after. Of course I like acting so much, but I need a way to stimulate myself. But I never had an ambitious career plan in mind.”

And then she drops her bombshell!

“Right now I’m thinking, after this year I might not act anymore. I’m thinking of going back to school. I’m quite interested in becoming a doctor. I’ll see how it goes.”

Does she really have the brains to do that, I wonder. 

But in the meantime she has a husband to fall back on.

And in fact they’ve just started working on the sequel to Underworld.

Six months ago I asked her if she and Len were planning a fairy tale wedding?

“I was a very girly girl growing up” she told me. “I’d love to have a fairy tale wedding even though I’d much rather see Die Hard than some romantic comedy.”

When will it be? I asked her.

“I don’t like to say because I don’t want it to be a big public thing. But I’m very much up to my ears in planning it. It’s so nice to prepare something that all your family and friends are so happy about.”

Will it be a big wedding or just family and friends?

“Sort of medium. Len’s got a giant family; he’s got four brothers and they’ve got like eighteen children each. And I’ve got all these step brothers and sisters and whatever; so it’ll be about 250 or 300 people and I’m like, ‘Wow, do you know that many people, let alone give them all fucking lobster?”

So this time I want to know how they were able to keep the wedding was so hush-hush.

No photo layouts in the tabloids.

No financial deals. 

Nothing!

”It was a bit like being in Mission Impossible 3 trying to get married,” she laughs. “Originally we  planned to get married in Las Vegas because we thought that would be fun, but then when we got there we didn’t really like it very much even though  everybody thought we were still getting married there. We thought we’d gotten away with it until a couple of days before, word leaked out, and we had to do a lot of getting in cars, switching to another car. I didn’t want to make it a big press thing, so we just ducked away from the helicopters and under umbrellas, and that was how we did it.”

Where did it take place?

“Here in L.A. at the Bel Air Hotel.”

Were both families in attendance?

“Yes, and mine actually came over from England.”

And there were no papparazzi there?

“I think we gave it away,” she jokes, “when we had a sing off at the beginning of the reception where all the British people sang God Save the Queen while the Americans sang My Country ‘Tis of Thee. It’s the same tune but I think the Americans slightly won.”

With Kate nothing is sacred, not even her marriage. 

So how different is it working with Len, now that they are husband and wife?

Crudely she replies, “He’s allowed to touch my bottom now. That’s the big thing. He sort of looked at it before.” 

Then seriously she continues, “It’s really fun. One of the reasons we were so excited to do a sequel now was because we are still in the honeymoon period. The thought of his going off to shoot a movie in Australia without me was unbearable; so luckily a sequel came along. We’ve only done the camera tests so thus far so we’ve been able to hold it together and be very professional on the set, but who knows in three months, it’s going to be inappropriate kissing at some point, I would imagine.”

At her last press conference she had genuine fears.

“I had a dark moment at three o’clock in the morning. I suddenly panicked.‘I really want to get married, but I’m worried about becoming a wife. That doesn’t sound sexy at all.’ But Len reassured me, ‘It’ll be okay.’ Wife sounded like you’ve got a big old chopping board and an apron.”

So has it been all good?

“It’s fantastic,” she beams. “Its the best thing I ever did. I am so happy with it. We keep waiting for, you know, when I have to start withholding sex. But it hasn’t happened yet. Not that I walk around 24 hours a day feeling like a wife. But 99% of it, finding the right person, is luck. I  don’t work any harder at my relationship than anybody else. I just feel very lucky that I met somebody who is very similar to me in many ways, and in the bad ways I’m trying to catch up to him because he’s made me a slightly more evolved person. And it’s just been bliss. After the wedding and the honeymoon, I sort of got the post partem wedding blues, and I wanted to do it all over again immediately, but that wouldn’t have gone over that well with my family who had all flown out. So far it’s been lovely. I’ll let you know when it starts to go bad.”

Irreverently she adds, “I’m sure it will. It’s Hollywood, you know.”

Speaking of Hollywood, how scared was she about playing one of screen’s most recognizable faces?

“I started work on the movie after it had been up and running for three months.  So the affairs were over, the fights were settled, all the drama that happens on a set had already happened. I was very much the new girl coming in. I remember my first day, you turn up and being Ava Gardner and having Martin Scorsese there and Leo trying to keep it together, Leo had a line in the scene where he had to say ‘Stop it.’ and I just kept stopping. He must be really good.”

So how good is he?

“Leo was insane.” (again laughing.) “It was a very different relationship that we had. In some of the first scenes we shot which come later in the film I was deeply embarrassed because he’s such a brilliant actor — I always thought he was brilliant — and there I was floundering.”

How did she transform herself for the part?

“I gained twenty pounds. Ava had a lot more boobs than I do. And she had much rounder features. We used contact lenses to make my eyes the right color. But I felt that using a prosthetic chin and things like would have been very distracting. And Marty’s goal was for us to play the characters as opposed to doing an imitation. 

And then as an afterthought she adds, “I must admit I felt more womanly with the little extra weight. ”

Did she study her movies?

“I was sort of locked in a room with her movies for several months, and Marty wanted me to listen to her voice in one particular movie, Mogambo, which I now know by heart because I’ve listened to it so many times.”

What was her biggest challenge?

“Anybody who’s very familiar with her during the forties is definitely going to look at me and go, ‘You don’t really look like her.’ So the most important thing was to embody her spirit. What I saw in her was, she was like one of the guys, she had a dignity and a strength and a wit that only in the 40’s could you get away with it. In that era it was possible to be strong and tough without being bitchy. You don’t see that much today. And she always had impeccable class,”

What about her love life. Did she research that?

“I read every book I could about her because I wanted to stay loyal to her story, but emphatically she claims she never had any kind of physical relationship with Howard Hughes. All the other 13 books I read say that she did. I tried to focus on her relationship with Frank Sinatra even though it came much later. There’re some wonderful stories from their tempestuous relationship, like the time they had an argument over the phone, and before he hung up all she heard was a shot fired. She ran over to his apartment, and there he was in bed with a drink, and a smoking gun, laughing at her. I thought that was wonderfully camp.”

Was it difficult to put on the weight?

“I had put on 75 pounds when I was pregnant so it wasn’t difficult. It’s nice to eat a little bit more chocolate than normal. I quite enjoyed that.”

Would she have rather been a moviestar in the 40s than now?

“The major difference is, these days they’re not so desperate to get a picture of a moviestar looking glamorous. They’d rather have one of them picking their nose or throwing up. I’d quite like not to have to worry about that. I’d like to be able to stab my husband in my hotel room without the papparazzi there. But then again the studio system was very oppressive then; so I guess it’s swings and roundabouts.”

One expression I’ve never heard before.