As a curvaceous vampire hunter in the “Underworld” films, Kate Beckinsale was the best friend black latex ever had. She captivated Howard Hughes in “The Aviator,” terrified audiences in “Vacancy,” added valiant romantic interest to “Pearl Harbor” and traded quips with Adam Sandler in “Click.”
Oxford-educated Beckinsale has established herself as a versatile leading lady. Filmmakers from action maestro Michael Bay to Martin Scorsese have recognized that her beauty accompanies great talent.
Beckinsale, who began her film career in emotionally challenging independent films before her exuberant work in “Underworld” and its sequel proved her bankable, returned to her roots in the just-released “Snow Angels.” Playing a waitress in an economically depressed Rust Belt town, saddled with a clinging ex (Sam Rockwell) and a 4-year-old she is ill-equipped to raise, Beckinsale spent weeks as a character in traumatic emotional pain.
That’s exactly the kind of role she’s been waiting to play for years, she said.
Since the 1999 birth of her daughter Lily, whose father is actor Michael Sheen of “The Queen,” she had felt reluctant to take on such demanding, serious roles.
“Early on I didn’t have a nanny and I felt totally in charge of my child,” she said. “Motherhood, especially single motherhood, is the most selfless thing you can do. And being an actor is about the most selfish thing you can do … So it’s hard to marry the two.”
With Lily growing up, “I had reached the point in my life I felt ready to make a really big emotional journey with a character. My single-motherhood days were over.”
While shooting “Underworld” in 2002, Beckinsale and Sheen, who starred as her nemesis, ended their relationship. Beckinsale and the film’s director, Len Wiseman, married in 2004.
“I felt I had a little bit more room to be kind of selfish enough to go there,” she said.
The script of “Snow Angels” “was really beautiful” in its alternating passages of despair and hopefulness, she said. “And it had been a while since I read a script that came my way that was like that. Not that I’d been necessarily averse to doing it, it just hadn’t come up.”
Beckinsale looked forward to playing a downscale character whose life is “a treadmill of drudgery and difficulty,” she said. After years of working on studio films, she was eager for the raw honesty of not-much-money and not-much-time independent filmmaking.
“If you set out from the get-go to be a movie star, I don’t think you’d have a very good time. I feel I kind of became a movie star by accident,” she said. “I’m still slightly in denial about that.”