Kate Beckinsale

Kate Beckinsale is an English actress whose three-decade career has spanned period costume drama, the Underworld action franchise, and a reputation as one of the more-active English-language film actresses of her generation. She was born Kathrin Romary Beckinsale on July 26, 1973, in Hounslow, London, England, into an acting family — her father Richard Beckinsale was a well-known British TV actor who died of a heart attack at age 31 when Kate was five, and her mother Judy Loe is also an actress. She read French and Russian literature at New College, Oxford.

Her career began with British period adaptations, including Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993, while she was still at Oxford) and the 1995 ITV adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (where she played Lizzy Bennett's older sister Jane). Her major American film breakthrough came with Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco (1998), and her commercial Hollywood breakthrough was the 2001 Pearl Harbor war epic.

Her commercial franchise was Underworld — the vampires-versus-werewolves action-fantasy series that began with Len Wiseman's 2003 Underworld (in which Beckinsale played the vampire "Death Dealer" Selene). The series produced four sequels through 2016 and grossed over $530 million worldwide, making Beckinsale one of the most-commercially-successful British female action-film leads of the 2000s and 2010s. She married director Len Wiseman in 2004 and the couple divorced in 2019.

Beyond the Underworld franchise, her major credits include Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), Click (2006, opposite Adam Sandler), Vacancy (2007), Whiteout (2009), Total Recall (2012), and Sky Atlantic's The Widow (2019). She has been active on Instagram and other social-media platforms — particularly for her irreverent humor and her continued physical-fitness regimen — making her one of the most-recognizable Generation X American-British actresses of the social-media era.

Her name Kate is the English short form of Katherine (from the Greek Aikaterinē of uncertain etymology, possibly from katharos meaning "pure"). Kate has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.