Kate Beckinsale
Kate Beckinsale was born Kathryn Bailey Beckinsale on July 26, 1973 to parents Judy Loe (a stage and television actress) and Richard Beckinsale (a well-known television actor). Her father died in 1979 at the age of 31 when she was 6.
She attended the all-girls private school, Godolphin and Latymer School in London. In her teens, she twice won the W.H. Smith Young Writers' competition - once for her three short stories and once for her three poems. Kate had a turbulent adolescence. She had a period of anorexia and started a smoking habit. After those years, however, she decided to follow in her parents' footsteps and take up acting.
In 1991, she debuted in a TV film about World War II called
One Against The Wind. In that same year, she began attending Oxford University majoring in French and Russian literature.
Her big break came when she was included in Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of William Shakespeare's
Much Ado About Nothing in 1993. In 1994, she had a role in the BBC satire show,
Cold Comfort Farm, which received good reviews in US art-house theatres and was a hit among the indie community.
She studied French and Parisian culture in her third year at Oxford. After completing school and spending a year away, she came to a cross-road in her life where she had to choose between school or acting. She chose to dedicate herself to being an actress.
Kate's first major American film,
Brokedown Palace (1999) was not a commercial success. Soon after, she was cast as the female lead in the 2001 movie,
Pear Harbor. In the following years, she appeared in a lot of movies:
Serendipity (2001),
Underworld (2003),
Van Helsing (2004),
The Aviator (2005),
Underworld: Evolution (2006),
Click (2006) and
Vacancy (2007).
She dated Welsh actor, Michael Sheen for a long time and they have a daughter, Lily Mo Sheen (born on January 31, 1999). They're already separated. Michael co-starred with Kate in the movie,
Underworld where she met her current husband, Len Wiseman (the movie's director). They were engaged in June 2003 and were married on May 9, 2004.
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