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| Kate Beckinsale Wallpaper |
Kate Beckinsale is the only child of actors Richard Beckinsale (1947–1979) and Judy Loe and was brought up in London. She had an eight-year relationship with Welsh actor Michael Sheen from 1995 until 2003. Their daughter, Lily Mo Sheen, was born in London in 1999. She married American film director Len Wiseman in 2004 and they live in Los Angeles, California. Publications such as Esquire and People Magazine have repeatedly included her in their annual rankings of the world's sexiest and most beautiful women. Kate Beckinsale has worked occasionally as a model in television and print campaigns to promote Gap denim, Diet Coke, Absolut Vodka and Lux shampoo.
Early life
Kate Beckinsale was born in London, England, the youngest child of actor Richard Beckinsale and actress Judy Loe. She made her first television appearance at the age of four in an episode of This is Your Life dedicated to her father. When she was five years old, her 31-year-old father died suddenly of a heart attack. Beckinsale was deeply traumatised by the loss and "started expecting bad things to happen". While she has seen her father "more on television than I have in life," "there are certainly enough memories for me not to feel that it's somebody I didn't know." Her widowed mother moved in with director Roy Battersby when Beckinsale was nine and she was raised alongside his four sons and daughter. She has a close relationship with her step-father: "I couldn't have knitted a better one ... He wasn't pushy, he let me come to him." Kate Beckinsale has a paternal half-sister, actress Samantha Beckinsale, but they have never had regular contact.
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She read French and Russian literature at New College, Oxford University and was later described by a contemporary, journalist Victoria Coren, as "whip-clever, slightly nuts and very charming". She was involved with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, most notably being directed by fellow student Tom Hooper in a production of A View from the Bridge at the Oxford Playhouse. She spent her third year in Paris as part of Oxford's study-abroad programme, after which she decided to leave university to concentrate on her burgeoning acting career: "It was getting to the point where I wasn't enjoying either thing enough because both were very high pressure. I was burning out and I knew I had to make a decision."
Personal life
Beckinsale had an eight-year relationship with Welsh actor Michael Sheen from 1995 until 2003. They met when cast in a touring production of The Seagull in early 1995 and moved in together shortly afterwards. She has said it was "love at first sight" and that he saved her from "a hospital for the criminally insane". In 1997, they appeared in a radio production of Romeo and Juliet. Their daughter, Lily Mo, was born in London, England on 31 January 1999. The actress has said she was "embarrassed" that Sheen never proposed but remarked, "If you keep a library book out long enough, you feel it's yours."
Their relationship ended in early 2003, after the filming of Underworld. Kate Beckinsale had persuaded director Len Wiseman to cast Sheen in the film but, while on set, she and Wiseman (who was married) fell in love. All parties have maintained there was no infidelity and Beckinsale and Wiseman both remain friends with Sheen. "We were very lucky in that we didn't have an acrimonious split," Beckinsale has said. "We are still very close and sees us around each other." "I love him dearly – I would miss him dreadfully if he wasn't in my life."
She relocated with her daughter from London to Los Angeles in 2003 to live with Wiseman. She has said she is "a fish out of water" in LA but that residing in London would be impractical for Wiseman's career. They married in 2004 at the Hotel Bel-Air in California, choosing a passage from Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass as their first reading. While she is not religious, she has said it was "very nice to be asked , which I wasn't in my previous relationship". Since their marriage, Wiseman has directed her in two further films: an Underworld sequel and Total Recall. She has no plans for more children: "Maybe I will at some point but I feel I have everything I want. Lily is the perfect child ... I am my mum and dad’s only child so I don’t really have the mindset for more children."
Kate Beckinsale does not drink alcohol, "not because I’m an alcoholic, I just don’t really like it": "If I drank a whole glass of red wine I would have Chekhovian despair the next day." She has smoked since the age of sixteen, but stopped for three years after becoming pregnant with her daughter. She has since said, "I’d be insufferable if I didn’t smoke. You’d have to push me off a balcony I’d be so boring.”
The British Heart Foundation has been her charity of choice "ever since I was six years old". She is also a supporter of the Epidermolysis Bullosa Medical Research Foundation, MediCinema, Habitat For Humanity and the Entertainment Industry Foundation. In 2008, she hosted the 4th Annual Pink Party to raise funds for the Women’s Cancer Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and organised a screening of All About Eve for FilmAid International.
Filmography
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| Kate Beckinsale |
1994 Uncovered
1994 Prince of Jutland
1995 Marie-Louise Ou La Permission
1995 Cold Comfort Farm
1995 Haunted
1997 Shooting Fish
1998 The Last Days of Disco
1998 Alice Through the Looking Glass
1999 Brokedown Palace
2001 Pearl Harbor
2001 Serendipity
2001 The Golden Bowl
2002 Laurel Canyon
2003 Underworld
2003 Tiptoes
2004 The Aviator
2004 Van Helsing
2006 Click
2006 Underworld: Evolution
2007 Vacancy
2007 Snow Angels
2008 Nothing but the Truth
2008 Fragments
2009 Whiteout
2009 Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
2009 Everybody's Fine
2012 Contraband
2012 Underworld: Awakening
2012 Total Recall
