Kate: 'I might not act anymore'

Beckinsale, however, regards her comet-like ascent with conspicuous reserve. As the child of two actors she knows the uncertainty of her profession. She was six when her father, Richard Beckinsale, died of a heart attack, aged 32, after achieving national stardom in the jail sitcom Porridge. Her mother, Judy Loe, continues to appear in British TV series. Kate feels that she herself simply followed whatever came up.

"I've made an awful lot of decisions just to see if I can do a part in a film rather than with a big ambitious career plan in mind. Even when I came here [to LA], I never felt like I fled England. I was quite happy with my career in England. I just wanted to try as many different things as possible."

IN England, she had worked with the country's finest. She got her big break as Hero in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, played Flora Poste in John Schlesinger's BBC film of Cold Comfort Farm and was a fine Emma Woodhouse in the ITV version of Jane Austen's Emma.

Her happiest time, she says, was on Underworld, the critically derided film on which she met Wiseman. "I arrived on the set in Budapest with another husband," she recalls, insisting that nothing happened with Wiseman until the shoot was over.

"Marrying him is the best thing I ever did," she says, smiling. "I am so happy with it. We keep waiting till I have to start withholding sex and being mean, but that hasn't happened yet. I feel I got very lucky and met someone I am very similar to in many ways, and in some ways I am trying to catch up with him because he is a slightly more evolved person than I am. It's just been bliss. I'll let you know when it starts to go bad. I'm sure it will. It's Hollywood."

If she jokes about her marriage being doomed, it is because she is aware of the pitfalls of being required to work for months at a time away from her husband. They are working now on preproduction of Underworld 2. "We are still in the honeymoon period and the thought of him going off to shoot in Australia is unbearable, so luckily this sequel came along. We've just done some camera tests and so far we've managed to be very professional in front of anyone else, but there's three months of shooting so there's probably going to be some inappropriate kissing at some point, I should imagine."

Beckinsale's common sense and good humour shine through our conversation. Her plan to quit movies does not appear to be an imitation of the coquetry of Hugh Grant, who has announced his retirement after each of his last few films. She seems resolutely wellbalanced.

But first there's publicity to be done all over the world for The Aviator. Beckinsale gained 20 pounds to play Ava Gardner, but there is little physical resemblance between them, less so than co-star Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn. "[Scorsese's] goal was for us to play the characters rather than try to look like them by wearing prosthetic chins," said Beckinsale. "We used contact lenses to make my eyes the right colour and obviously I felt a bit more womanly with a little extra weight on. She had a lot more boobs than I do and much rounder features."

She and Blanchett often talked on set about their anxiety at being foreign actresses playing American acting icons. "We sat in a trailer one day saying, 'What are we doing?' This is such a bad idea, everybody's going to be disappointed before we've even started because we are not actually these people."

But the Gardner that Beckinsale depicts is the lesser-known goddess, the actress before her biggest roles in The Killers, Mogambo and Bhowani Junction. "Someone who is very familiar with Ava Gardner when she was in her forties is going to say that I don't look like her then," she says. "But we were aiming for a particular time period and the most important thing for me was to embody the spirit that made her beloved. She was 'one of the guys'.

She had a dignity and strength and wit that you could have as a woman in the Forties. You could be strong and tough then without being bitchy. It's really unusual these days. They could drink and swear and smoke, but they weren't trashy."

As for comparisons between being a screen siren then and now, Beckinsale comes back to the media. "These days the paparazzi are not so desperate to get a picture of a movie star looking glamorous," she says. "They want to get one of you picking your nose or throwing up, and that's something I would quite like not to worry about. I'd like to stab my husband in my hotel room without the paparazzi being there."

So is she really going to quit? Now? When she is one of the soaring stars in the Hollywood firmament? "I am thinking I might go back to school," she confirms quietly. "I am just going to see how it goes. We'll see."

Mike Goodridge is the US editor of Screen International.