Cutting edge

Interview, July, 1998 by Dina Rabinovitch

But, if usually cool and laid-back, Beckinsale never recreates the same persona each time. She has the rare ability to make "posh" sympathetic by suggesting the neuroses - vulnerability, neediness, low self-esteem - that explain her privileged characters' resorting to slyness or cruelty. Even when she's playing a likable woman, Beckinsale isn't blithe: she imports qualities of patience and understanding that most screen acting is too busy to bother with. Perhaps one reason Beckinsale can put such a remarkably different face on each of her characters is her own emotional sophistication. The daughter of actress Judy Loe and beloved sitcom star Richard Beckinsale - who died of a heart attack at thirty-one when Kate was five - she has had to plumb the depths of her psyche as thoroughly as any twenty-four-year-old. Aa highly sensitive teenager, she won writing competitions that helped her get into Oxford University. Her writer's eye seems to have given her a developed sense of Irony, although In person she's neither as knowing or cutting as, say, The Last Days of Disco's Charlotte. During our conversation at the WeSt London cafeteria where she once worked as a waitress, Beckinsale sometimes stopped short in the middle of a sentence and laughed at herself. It's the same self-awareness that makes her performances so vital.

DINA RABINOVITCH: Kate, tell me, did you just fall into acting?

KATE BECKINSALE: No. I think if your parents are in the business, it's always a question. Either you do go into it, or you quite dramatically don't. If I have children I am going to make sure people don't ask them, "Are you going to be an actor?" My mother said I could be anything I wanted except a policeman.

DR: It's lucky you didn't turn out to be a policeman then.

KB: I think I'm overqualified.

DR: You studied French and Russian at Oxford. Did you share a place with friends, like in The Last Days of Disco?

KB: Oh, no. I'm terrible at sharing. I need to have the option of lying flat on the carpet, pretending I am not in. I couldn't bear having flatmates who say, "Oh, yes, she's upstairs, go on up." That's the great thing about Michael [Sheen, Beckinsale's actor boyfriend]: he's an accomplice. He comes over and lies on the carpet with me.

DR: I suppose your need for privacy might be the result of growing up with a lot of step-siblings?

KB: Well, I was nine when Mum started living with Roy [Battersby, the director], and he had one daughter and four sons. They all came to stay for long weekends and holidays; they were around a fair bit. At first I didn't like boys: They seemed like these terrible foul-mouthed creatures. I was very pious and good at the time. Now of course, I've turned into the one who swears more than anybody. And I wouldn't be without my step-family.

DR: Your father died nearly twenty years ago, but he's still mentioned all the time.

KB: Yes, but that is also because he died young - he never went off the boil in his career. It's a very difficult thing losing a parent, but I think there's an added complication for me, because he was so well-loved and he had this very open charm that made people feel they had a personal relationship with him.

DR: You went through quite a rough patch in your teens.

KB: I had a fair old bit to sort through. I was anorexic, weighing five stone [seventy pounds] at fifteen. I always felt that anorexia was the form of breakdown most readily available to adolescent girls. Its place and role in the family is very interesting: There is usually one person in the family who unknowingly becomes the catalyst for things - almost the scapegoat in a way - to stop the whole structure from collapsing. After I got better, I kept quiet about it for a long time. But then I began to think that a lot of people don't recover as well as I have, and I think I understand quite a lot about it, so I mentioned it in an interview with Company magazine. But the way they handled it was to say, "Isn't she thin? and, oh, how terribly tragic," and of course by then it had been several years since I'd had anorexia. It then became one of those things that follow you around. It made me feel quite funny talking about it.

DR: But you got through it.

KB: I had five years of intense Freudian analysis, which I don't think a lot of girls of my age do. I was never threatened with force-feeding. My family didn't respond to my anorexia as a physical illness, which was terribly important. Anorexia is a red herring, and I think if you address the red herring you're fucked, because everything that is going on underneath carries on. I know girls whose parents were kneeling on their chests and pouring ice cream down their throats. My parents would never have done that, even though they probably wanted to.

DR: Were you the only Brit on The Last Days of Disco?

KB: I was very much the foreigner working in an American accent. I think Whit [Stillman, the director] thrives on people not knowing exactly what they are doing. But where he is really very clever is that, in his films, you don't get a sense of the confusion we felt on set; people seem to know exactly what they are doing, I know when I watched [Stillman's] Metropolitan [1990], I thought, How did he get everybody to do that, to be so deadpan?