Kate Beckinsale Biography Published in Mr. Showbiz, October 2001 Kate Beckinsale, who's almost as identified with corsets and classics as fellow British actress Helena Bonham Carter, nearly didn't get cast in the American blockbuster Pearl Harbor because of what she wore to the audition: a pair of black leather pants. "I think they were worried that I was too much of a rock chick," the willowy actress, whose non-leather-wearing roles include Much Ado About Nothing, Cold Comfort Farm, and The Golden Bowl, told Entertainment Weekly. Wisdom prevailed, and Beckinsale got the high-profile part, as an Army nurse in a love triangle with flyboys Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett just days before the fateful Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Still, it wasn't all smooth sailing. "It was only when I walked on set [in Hawaii] that I realized 'This … is … a … huge … movie!'" the actress told EW. Like everyone in a Michael Bay movie, Beckinsale quickly learned that actors take second place to the big action, and if she wasn't dodging pyrotechnics, she was trying to do a love scene in the middle of the ocean. It didn't help after the film was wrapped to hear such left-handed comments about her as Bay's to Movieline, "I didn't want [to cast] someone who was too beautiful. Women feel disturbed when they see someone's too pretty." (Although the notoriously tough director of The Rock did admit that "our Kate" is "pretty funny [and] could hang with the guys.") While Pearl Harbor was almost universally panned, the movie helped introduce Beckinsale to the rest of the world. The future actress was born in London in 1973 to an acting family. Her father, Richard Beckinsale, a popular sitcom actor, died at age 31, when Kate was only five. "There were two really definitive British sitcoms in the '70s, and he happened to be in both of them," Kate told Interview magazine. "He had an innocent sort of charm, and he was also extremely attractive, so he had quite a wide appeal. When he died, it was really shocking, and he became someone that everybody remembers, even now." Having felt now that she's said "everything there is to be said," about her father's untimely passing, the actress is also uncomfortable talking about her now long-ago battle with anorexia, an issue that seems to get dragged out afresh for each interview. However, her take on it is a healthily irreverent one. "I think it's just as likely that one would be an alcoholic or a drug addict," she told Interview, "but in terms of young teenage girls, good students from nice families, they're not quite as au fait with scoring heroin. Luckily, though, my family was on to what I was doing. And although four days a week of Freudian analysis is a heavy and slightly odd thing to do at 15, it was certainly a lot better than throwing me into a hospital." In high school, Kate won national prizes for her short stories and poetry, and then went on to study Russian literature at Oxford, where her studying was put aside after she won an audition for Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film Much Ado About Nothing, playing the innocent Hero. After two more years of study, she dropped out to focus on acting. One fateful early role was a 1994 touring production of The Seagull, in which she met Welsh actor Michael Sheen, who became her boyfriend and eventually the father of her daughter, Lily, who was born in 1999. "He is as intense as I am, and we did a lot of yelling in the beginning," Beckinsale told People magazine. "Our honeymoon period has come later." The duo hasn't actually tied the knot yet. "We got surprised with the baby and simply haven't gotten around to the marriage thing," says the actress. She next hit her stride as the makeover-mad Flora Poste in 1997's hilarious British cult film Cold Comfort Farm, and as another well-meaning meddler in the 1996 BBC production of Jane Austen's Emma, which many considered better than the theatrical version starring Gwyneth Paltrow that came out the same year. Besides the anorexia, the "is that really true?" items that pop up to plague the actress are a report that she peed in a director's thermos — done for revenge when she was 17, and the director, "who shall remain nameless," made her cry during a nude scene — and that her boyfriend, Sheen, punched actor Jeremy Northam on the set of The Golden Bowl. "He had never hit anyone before in his life, and it was kind of shocking," she told The Times of London about the incident, which started when Sheen saw Northam yelling at Beckinsale. "But in a weird way, it really broke the ice and it was all OK after that." Kate took the "frumpy" role of the neglected wife in the Merchant-Ivory drama, although she originally thought she was up for the sexier role that went to screen goddess Uma Thurman. "As an actress, it was a great experience. As a babe, it was a blow to the ego," she confessed to the Houston Chronicle. "I'd just had a baby, and I was 20 pounds heavier, and it was appropriate for the part." Still, she was glad to get the part of the innocent, vulnerable wife, feeling that after playing a manipulative, self-centered New Yorker in Whit Stillman's indie The Last Days of Disco, she was in danger of being typecast. "I was getting sent a lot of bitchy, whorey, beautiful, aristocratic girl scripts," she said. Her transition to American films was looking somewhat shaky following the indifferent reaction to the Midnight Express-like Brokedown Palace with Claire Danes. Then came the call for Pearl Harbor, followed by a request from John Cusack that she play his superstitious love interest in the romantic comedy Serendipity. So strong was Cusack's conviction that only Kate could adequately play the mysterious Sara, whom he meets once and obsesses over for years until fate reunites them, that he put the entire film on hold until after her pregnancy. On filming the back-to-back romances, Beckinsale told People, "I was kissing a lot of boys in one week," referring to her dreamy co-stars Affleck, Hartnett, Cusack, and Serendipity's also-ran, John Corbett. "These guys were totally gorgeous and burnished. My poor child [Lily] will go to school totally disappointed because all the boys she'll meet won't look like that." Next up for Beckinsale is Laurel Canyon opposite Christian Bale, with whom she co-starred in one of her early films, The Prince of Jutland. The indie film will also co-star Almost Famous' Frances McDormand, and be directed by High Art's Lisa Cholodenko. — Sharon Knolle Copyright ©2001 Mr. Showbiz