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Kate Beckinsale through the years

There are several reasons why I have long admired Kate Beckinsale. She’s a talented actress, who is capable of both excellent comic timing and subtle emotional response. She is, to state the obvious, extremely beautiful. She’s intelligent — she had started a degree at Oxford, studying French and Russian, before she dropped out after her third year to pursue her flourishing acting career. But, courtesy of the fan site KBeckinsale.net, I think I may just have found another reason to admire her:

The site doesn’t state what year this photo was taken, but I think it’s safe to assume she can’t have been more than 18. I honestly cannot imagine what you would have had to do to me when I was a teenager to persuade me to pose with my mother (that’s Kate’s mom, actress Judy Loe, on the right), in matching outfits as if we were both dancing. I truly think that there’s something admirable, not only about being able to do something so adorably dorky, but also to look really cheerful doing it. Mothers across the world must wish their teenage daughters would be as sulk-deficient as Kate.

Perhaps the cheerfulness has something to do with the fact that it was about this time that she captured her first big-screen role, featuring as the sweet, innocent Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s excellent film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. I was 12 the year the movie was released, in 1993, and when I set eyes on Kate, it was pretty much love at first sight:

Since then I’ve also grown fond of Emma Thompson, who costarred as Hero’s older and wiser cousin, Beatrice:

After Much Ado, Kate starred in a series of British period pieces: the hilarious rural comedy Cold Comfort Farm, the old-fashioned ghost story Haunted, and the BBC adaptation of Emma. Perhaps in order to try to force casting agents to consider her in more modern parts, she then hacked off her hair:

Which led to a role as the tomboyish Georgie in Brit comedy Shooting Fish, before she snagged her first Hollywood job opposite Chloe Sevigny in The Last Days of Disco:

She starred with Claire Danes

in the drama Brokedown Palace, about two best friends imprisoned on a charge of drug smuggling in Thailand:

(A warning: you should be prepared to cry if you see this movie).

What came next, of course, was the part in Pearl Harbor that was to launch her as a bona fide Hollywood star. While I hope we can all agree that the film was … not a masterpiece, the publicity for it did at least give us Kate in a soldier hat:

Then there was the Lisa Cholodenko–helmed

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