BEAUTY KATE ON HER LOVE SPLIT

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BEAUTY KATE ON HER LOVE SPLIT

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THEY were two up-and-coming acting talents who seemed made for each other. And Kate Beckinsale and her long-time boyfriend Michael Sheen had a beautiful young daughter to set the seal on their love.
This time last year, their families and friends felt sure they belonged together and marriage was just around the corner.
Today Kate is proudly wearing a glittering diamond engagement ring. But she's not marrying Michael, her boyfriend of nine years. The man who will meet her at the altar is Hollywood director Len Wiseman - and she has known him for little more than nine months. THRILLER: Kate plays a vampire in a new movie
"I can't bear to be away from Len," she says. "I feel this incredible bond with him. I'm sure everybody hears some actress say: 'Oh, we're soulmates' and thinks: 'We'll wait a couple of years and just see what happens.' But I don't even care about that because I'm just so happy."
Pearl Harbor and Serendipity star Kate, 30, met Len on the set when she played a feisty vampire in his latest movie, Underworld.
By a bitter irony, Welsh actor Michael also stars in the thriller - but seemed unaware that Kate had fallen for Len.
It was April when Kate revealed she was seeing Wiseman, 29, just a month after announcing her split from Michael, 34.
It sparked rumours, strenuously denied, that her new romance must have started on set.
There was further devastation for Michael - who plays a werewolf in the film - when steamy pictures appeared in a Sunday newspaper showing Wiseman caressing Kate's breasts and nuzzling her neck as she closed her eyes in ecstasy.
Kate insists they gave a totally wrong impression of what happened.
"I didn't like the fact that our break-up was interpreted in this kind of cold-blooded and callous way that I suddenly went from one man to the next," she says.
"You don't spend such a very long time with someone and act impulsively. It's never pleasant to come to the end of a relationship that was such a huge part of my life.
"Michael is a very supportive, brilliant man with whom I spent nearly 10 years."
Trying to explain what went wrong she adds: "I said to him: 'Why aren't we married?' And he said because every single time he was going to ask me, I did something annoying."
Kate cancelled interviews in the furore surrounding her break-up, but now she is relaxed and at ease talking about it.
She is dressed casually in jeans and a silk blouse, her flawless porcelain complexion has just a trace of make-up. Despite her understated appearance, she looks a million dollars.
The intimate photos of her and Wiseman appeared just a month after she and Michael announced their separation.
Sheen's family were heartbroken by the actions of the woman they had loved like a daughter.
But Kate says it is futile to look back with regrets or dwell on guilt.
"It's pointless to point the finger and try to attach blame or make yourself feel guilty," she says with a sigh.
"That's not healthy. But I'm fortunate to have been able to find someone who means the world to me and makes me very happy."
SHE denies there has been a rift with Michael and insists they will stay close, with the welfare of their four-year-old daughter Lily their prime concern.
"Even though people might not want to believe it, Michael and I are still friends and he's still a big part of Lily's life and she couldn't have a better father," she says.
"That's what's important to me rather than all the other speculation."
As the conversation switches to the new man in her life, a huge smile makes Kate's eyes sparkle and she becomes a lovestruck teenager.
Wiseman is the name that turns the serene English-rose star into a giggling, blushing schoolgirl who doesn't care who knows she is in love.
"It sounds ridiculous, but when you know, you really do," she smiles. "I don't feel good when I'm not with him. I don't like not having him there. I like experiencing the world with him in it."
And she happily admits that she would love the chance to work with him again.
She adds: "I definitely intend to be with Len whenever he's directing a movie."
It's an obvious "hands-off" warning to any starlets who may be thinking that they might get a bigger role by winning over the director. In this case they'll have to charm his girlfriend first.
Kate has never minced her words. She says of her battle with anorexia in her teens: "I was a just a f****d-up teenager like everyone else."
But her troubles have always been played out on a public stage.
She was only five when her father, heart-throb Porridge actor Richard Beckinsale, died.
Kate felt she was in her father's shadow as she grew up and believes moving to America has helped her develop as an actress.
"When I was growing up, I had a lot of problems with my self- image and my sense of who I was," she says.
"It was important to me to be able to come here and build up my career where no one knew me and where I wasn't going to be identified with my dad.
I LIKED being able to start afresh and see how far I could go on my own terms without people thinking that you're riding on your late father's coat-tails and name."
Richard, who also starred in Rising Damp, was just 31 when he suffered a fatal heart attack, and Kate is acutely aware that she is only a year younger than he was when he died.
Poignantly, she says: "I have seen him more on television than I have in life, but there are certainly enough memories for me not to feel that it's somebody I didn't know."
And although America is home for now, Kate is keen to return to Britain to live near her actress mum Judy Loe in Chiswick, West London.
She has set her heart on Lily attending her old school, Godolphin and Latymer in nearby Hammersmith.
"Education is so important but I also want Lily to get to know her grandmother better," she says. "It's important that she grows up in my culture.
"She already says pants instead of trousers and elevator instead of lift. That's more than enough for me."
Kate is unsure how she will be received in Underworld - the story of an aggressive vampire who shoots to kill and is seeking vengeance for her parents' deaths.
But she had a ball doing her own stunts and spent three months being trained in fight sequences and gymnastics.
"The gymnastics nearly killed me," she says, "but I surprised myself at how easily I managed the gun stuff.
"I have fairly large hands for a girl, so it was no problem at all for me to hold the guns and do the loading.
"I probably do more shooting than anyone else in the film."
Unlike old-style vampire films in which Dracula sinks his fangs into his hapless victims, in Underworld the undead are gunned down with silver nitrate and ultra-violet bullets and there's not a garlic clove in sight.
Kate says: "There's a particular kind of excitement in seeing a woman kick ass. It goes far beyond any kind of physical acting I'd ever attempted before."
And it's a far cry from her days as an Oxford undergraduate who was studying French and Russian when she was poached by Kenneth Branagh in 1993 to appear in the film version of Much Ado About Nothing.
A string of costume dramas followed and Kate was being hailed as the new Helena Bonham Carter - a deliciously cool star of beautifully filmed period pieces.
Now Underworld is about to re-launch her as a sexy, rubber-clad vamp who shoots first and asks questions afterwards.
It could be the film that takes her into the world she dreads the most - that of the Hollywood superstar.
Naively, she says: "I can't imagine what it would be like to be such a big star that paparazzi are constantly following your every move and poking through your garbage. I would find that awful.
"I enjoy being out of the limelight because I'm quite meek and I don't like having too much attention and fuss over me."
Unless, of course, it's caresses from Wiseman, the fiance from whom she simply can't bear to be parted. By Ruki Sayid