As a Modern Languages student, she was required to spend her third year abroad, and studied in Paris. 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. īeckinsale read French and Russian literature at New College, Oxford, and was later described by contemporary journalist Victoria Coren Mitchell, as "whip-clever, slightly nuts, and very charming". 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 at age fifteen, and underwent Freudian psychoanalysis for four years. She has described herself as a "late bloomer": "All of my friends were kissing boys and drinking cider way before me. She was twice a winner of the WH Smith Young Writers Award for both fiction and poetry. īeckinsale 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. Family friends included Ken Loach and Vanessa Redgrave. 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. She has a close relationship with her stepfather, who was a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party during her youth. When she was five, her 31-year-old father died instantly of a heart attack 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. 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. Her father was partly of Burmese descent. She has an older paternal half-sister, actress Samantha Beckinsale, but they are not in regular contact.
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