Kate Beckinsale is Flaunt’s latest cover girl. The beautiful 38-year-old ‘Underworld’ actress sits down for a chat with the magazine and talks about her fear of heights, ‘Pearl Harbor’, her family and childhood, winning the award for Best Writer of the Year in England, moving to Los Angeles, and many more.
Speaking about her fear of heights, Kate explains that, “I’m not terrible on heights. I’m worse if you wanted me to get into a coffin. I also wouldn’t like to be in a pod in space, and then suddenly be absolutely cut off, and just be whizzing around space forever by myself. We’re absolutely not doing that today either.”
The stunning actress also reveals a few things regarding her family. Her father was Richard Beckinsale, one of England’s most famous sitcom actors, who died when she was five, while her mother, Judy Loe, was also a television actress, who continues to win roles on doctor dramas. Well, in this circumstances, one cannot speak of a very normal childhood! “Who did, though, quite frankly? My mother was very against coloring your hair. I was the girl who wasn’t allowed to do that stuff … My mother would never have said it was okay to buy me a car; that would never happen. We always had to work for that,” Kate told the magazine.
Kate was twice awarded Best Writer of the Year in England. “I was given the prize by Ted Hughes. It was the most exciting thing to this day. It was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m actually getting a poetry prize from Ted Hughes. He’s read it, and he’s picked me.’ That was crazy,” the actress recalls.
On ‘Pearl Harbor’, the highest priced movie in history at the time, Kate told ‘Flaunt’ that, “When Pearl Harbor came out, I never really paid any attention to the box office, and they called up — I don’t remember the number but it was really high — ‘We’re really happy it made 49 million in a weekend,’ and I went, ‘Is that good?’ I had no idea. And I hadn’t just got off the boat. I had a kid by then, I had been working for a good six to seven years. I didn’t feel like a hick; I felt rather sophisticated, but I clearly was a hick.”
As for her career, she confesses that, “Basically, the really big movies that I have done that suck, have, for me, turned out at various crisis points in my life where I think, ‘S**t, I need to make sure I can take care of my kid.’ As simple as that. You know, it’s a weird thing that your hobby, the thing you feel great about, is also the thing that makes you go, ‘Okay, well, I have to be able to pay a mortgage bill.’ It shouldn’t be the case. The bottom line is that will happen sometimes.”
Beckinsale also reveals how she ended up moving to Los Angeles. “I actually moved out here because I fell in love with somebody who couldn’t live in England. So, even though I had been doing some movies here and had spent four months at a stretch, but Len couldn’t really work in London. It’s different when you move out and realize, ‘Oh my god, I haven’t got a dentist.’ You start from scratch building all that stuff up again,” she said.
The actress took some time off from filmmaking in order to spend quality time with Lily. “I’ve been away for a whole year. It’s been great. I didn’t find anything I wanted to do enough to take me away from my kid. After the writers’ strike, everybody thought there would suddenly be this surge of really great material that everybody had been quietly doing during the strike. But, it turns out they weren’t — they were having breakdowns. It’s not much of a creative time, when you’re really depressed and you’re worried your house is getting foreclosed,” Kate admits.
Read Kate Beckinsale’s full interview in Flaunt Magazine.
Photos courtesy of FLAUNT
