Kate Beckinsale graces the August 2020 issue of Glamour UK. The magazine sat down for a chat with the 38-year-old actress and talked about a wide range of topics including beauty, losing her dad at an early age, the idea of having another baby, and what she has in common with the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. “I’m a horrible singer and I’d love to be so flamboyant and charismatic and eccentric. I’m comfortable in a catsuit. With a moustache? Oh, I think so. I am halfway there with the teeth,” she says.
When it comes to beauty, Beckinsale confesses that she doesn’t want to turn into a person “with wind-tunnel face”. “I feel like beauty is a gift that you have for a while, and you enjoy the hell out of it while you have it. And if you’re lucky enough to have a daughter and you give it to her, you enjoy the fact she has it. My mother was always very, very beautiful – she still is, in her sixties. I’m sure she feels, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if my neck did this?’ but not to the degree of cutting parts of herself odd and dragging them behind her ears. I feel very similar. I much prefer how my mother looks to the people I see here [in Los Angeles] with wind-tunnel face,” the ‘Total Recall’ actress says.
In her interview with Glamour UK, Beckinsale also dishes on the pressure the media puts on celebrity moms’ to regain their figures in no time. “There’s an obsessional hatred of normal human processes. Pregnancy changes a woman’s body and should. It isn’t normal to not look like you’ve had a baby immediately after you’ve had a baby. I was gigantic after I had Lily – I put on a good 3 ½ stone, and it didn’t go ‘til I stopped breast feeding… I was lucky that Britain wasn’t so paparazzi-orientated [then]. I was allowed to get on with it and enjoy my baby – and figure out what being a mother was all about instead of worrying about [fitting into] my f**king jeans,” the actress says.
What about the possibility of having another child? “There’s absolutely part of me that goes, ‘I’d love to have a baby in the relationship I’m in, and have that experience when the relationship’s really good and exclusive,’ but I’m just not sure. At some point the decision will be made for me, when my ovaries dry up and die. We’ll see. There’s nothing that makes me go, ‘And now I must have triplets,’” Kate told Glamour.
The actress confesses that losing her dad at an early age has changed her view on growing older. Her father died when she was only five years old. “I love ‘pretty’ as much as anybody, but if that’s all there is as a culture, we’re screwed. I think you have to be as objective about that as possible and say, ‘There is nothing that serves my soul in wondering how crow’s feet are going to affect my life.’ It’s something to be resisted. Ageing is going to happen and it should. My father died at 31, so to me ageing is extremely preferable to the alternative, which is not ageing. Every year I get past 31, I think, ‘Thank God.’ It’s a gift to be able to go, ‘I look different, that means I’m not dead!’”
Photos courtesy of GLAMOUR UK