Kate Beckinsale

Kathrin Romany Beckinsale was born on 26 July 1973 in the Chiswick district of London, the only child of actors Richard Beckinsale and Judy Loe. She has a half-sister from her father's earlier marriage, actress Samantha Beckinsale. Her father was partly of Burmese descent. Her parents did not marry until 1977, prior to Beckinsale starting nursery school, when she made her first television appearance at age four, in an episode of This Is Your Life, dedicated to her father. When she was five, her father died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 31. She was deeply traumatised by the loss and "started expecting bad things to happen."

Her widowed mother moved in with director Roy Battersby when Beckinsale was nine and she was brought up alongside his four sons and daughter. She had a close relationship with her stepfather, who was a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party during her youth. She helped to sell The News Line, a Trotskyist newspaper, as a little girl and has said the household phone was tapped following Battersby's blacklisting by the BBC. Family friends included Ken Loach and Vanessa Redgrave.

Beckinsale was educated at Godolphin and Latymer School, an independent school for girls in Hammersmith, West London, and was involved with the Orange Tree Youth Theatre. She was twice a winner of the WH Smith Young Writers Award for both fiction and poetry. She has described herself as a "late bloomer": "All of my friends were kissing boys and drinking cider way before me. I found it really depressing that we weren't making camp fires and everyone was doing stuff like that." She had a nervous breakdown and developed anorexia aged 15, and underwent Freudian psychoanalysis for four years.

Beckinsale studied Russian at school and read French and Russian literature at New College, Oxford, and was later described by her contemporary Victoria Coren Mitchell, as "whip-clever, slightly nuts, and very charming". She became friends with

Roy Kinnear's daughter Kirsty. She was involved with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, most notably being directed by fellow student Tom Hooper in a production of A View from the Bridge at the Oxford Playhouse. As a Modern Languages student, she was required to spend her third year abroad, and studied in Paris. She then quit university to focus on her burgeoning acting career: "It was getting to the point where I wasn't enjoying either thing enough because both were very high pressure." Beckinsale has stated she would like to complete her studies at Oxford University.