Yet Another Kate Interview

Kate on the set of Vacancy with director Nimród Antal


"I was the least athletic person I've ever met and I'm a girly-girl," she says. "I like kittens and puppies. None of this was planned. `Underworld' was an exercise to see if I could do it. And it seems to have run away from me a bit." The modestly priced "Underworld" films feature Beckinsale as a Lycra-sheathed vampire who battles werewolves.


The original cleared more $51.9 million at the box office and the sequel $62.3 million. Both have enjoyed a healthy afterlife on DVD, another reason for her ascent to genre royalty. It might also explain why she was chosen to replace "Sex and the City's" Sarah Jessica Parker in "Vacancy," playing the fairer half of an embittered couple whose therapy turns out to be a brush with death. (In an unwitting attempt at method acting, the two reportedly bickered on the set.)


FYI - Kate has dismissed that last sentence ;-)

Beckinsale's Amy and Luke Wilson's David check into a motel, but they aren't supposed to check out. They become aware that they have been cast in a snuff movie. The fear factor for Beckinsale included rats and a tunnel, just perfect for her real-life claustrophobia. "I have two small fears: being in small spaces and somebody vomiting on me," she says.

While she may be the reigning monarch of films you might see at a drive-in, she has had a varied career. She played a Lady covered by pig muck in "Cold Comfort Farm" (1995), a fate-tangled lover in the romantic comedy "Serendipity" (2001) and Ava Gardner in Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator" (2004). Her thespian chops have been celebrated (by the London Critics Circle for 1998's "The Last Days of Disco" (1998) and reviled (a shared Razzie, the anti-Oscar, for 2001's "Pearl Harbor"). But in terms of capturing an audience on her own, nothing has clicked like "Underworld."

"I think it's a strange fan base in terms of my whole body of work," says Beckinsale, who also played a vampire slayer in "Van Helsing." "I've got some great literary old farts in there like me, and teenage boys in there." And probably the teenage boys' dads, too.



The 33-year-old London native is a regular presence in the "who's sexiest?" ratings of lad magazines. She got her thoroughbred looks from her actor-parents, Judy Loe and Richard Beckinsale, who died when his daughter was almost 6. She also inherited their urge to perform. After an adolescent struggle with anorexia, she tried literature at Oxford and life in Paris but found a home in show business when Kenneth Branagh cast her as Hero in his film version of "Much Ado About Nothing" (1993).

Beckinsale is awaiting distribution of "Snow Angels," a Sundance heavy focusing on her character's frazzled marriage. The film was adapted from a book by Avon's Stewart O'Nan. "It's a very emotionally wrenching movie," she says. "That was one of the reasons it was such a fantastic acting job. I thought the book was a beautiful."

I very much look forward to seeing "Snow Angels". Should be a new turn in her career.

There have been conversations about a third "Underworld," which could reunite her onscreen with her husband, director Len Wiseman. (The two fell in love while shooting the first "Underworld"; Beckinsale left her boyfriend and "Underworld" co-star Michael Sheen, the father of her 8-year-old daughter.) "I'd love to do another project with my husband," she says. "I'd love to get my husband in the same country as me."

One production not in the works is adding to her family. "I think I'm pretty happy with what I've got going on," she says. While "Vacancy" is no manual to restoring marital bliss, Beckinsale says we should recognize the humanity in the story, how an extreme situation can "make you realize how much you do love someone or love them at all."

Tomorrow - My look at Kate's 2006 styles!