Kate Beckinsale Is the Sexiest Woman Alive

http://www.esquire.com/women/women-we-love/kate-beckinsale-pictures-1109

October 2, 2009

Kate Beckinsale Is the Sexiest Woman Alive

For a decade, we've loved her — beautiful, crisp, smart, tough. Isn't it time to pay more attention to Kate Beckinsale?

By Tom Chiarella

She wants to meet in one of those places where women meet other women for lunch, to talk forever, to eat salads and split entrées, where the sweaters are stretchy, the jewelry outsized, the purses massive and sexless, where fruity tea is served in ceramic pots. From the bench across the street, I can see this much. In the hour before we meet, twenty-three women and nary a man cross the threshold.

Then up the sidewalk here she comes, the acrobatic, rubber-suited ass-kicking vampire of the Underworld movies, the corseted vampire hunter of the underappreciated action lark Van Helsing, the willowy, repressed Ph.D. candidate of the widely overlooked Laurel Canyon. She's got her shoulder into the shank of the wind, elbows clamped around a head-to-calf sweater, a big black purse netted to her side, and face covered by the thick black gusts of her own hair. She knows the friendly, undersexed dress code, the mousy habit of this kind of establishment.

After she's delivered her grrrl hugs to the management, I introduce myself. In the dark portico, she looks a little moonless, unilluminated behind the sunglasses. But in the solarium on the second floor, when we're left alone behind French doors, she drops the sweater from her shoulders with a shrug. She's wearing hot pants, a trim white blouse over a tank top, black boots with heels. If there is a difference between femininity and sexiness, this may be it. She is sexy, boot to temple. The wrought-iron furniture? Feminine in every curlicue.

"Fuck, it's hot in here," is the first thing she says, jangling me out of the ungovernable vibe of the room. There's a tiny window behind me that opens onto some indefinite interior space that somehow provides a little breeze, and I crack it. "Oh, better," she says. "It's very windy out there today. It's a bit Wizard of Oz or something."

On her finger: skull ring. Huge. This rose-gold skull staring from the crook of her knuckle. Biggest ring I've ever seen. Pearls in the eyeholes and everything. Cool. And definitely not sexless.

"Is this all right?" she says. She means the room. It is, I tell her, though I admit I had my doubts from across the street, when it looked as if we were meeting in the estrogen lounge. Kate laughs. A big, rooted, unstagey laugh. Not loud. Ample. Bigger than the room, not as big as the ring. "Were you worried that there would be a G-spot orgasm class in the corner?"

She eases herself behind the table, sits as if she's falling. Then she snorts, taking a glance at my pad when I lay it on the table. I tell her I'm happy to show it to her. There's a question about her American accent, which I first heard eleven years ago in The Last Days of Disco. And a quote from a guy on the plane who watched her most recent movie with me on the flight over. It's a little drama called Nothing But the Truth, in which Kate plays a journalist jailed for not revealing her sources — a dainty reporter/soccer mom who transforms into a hard-ass prison convict. You never heard of it, neither had he, neither had I, because a last-minute bankruptcy last December sent it into the pit of straight-to-DVD despair rather than onto the Oscar short list. The guy on the plane loved it. We both did. I wrote down what he said. "Who knew the woman would have all the balls," the quote reads, "in the best movie you never heard of?"

After that, I have a question about all the fighting she does in movies — does it feel good to punch a man? — followed by a list of the things that make a woman sexy, doodled as I sat on a bench across the street, which is really just a description of my girlfriend. Like this: I like a woman who smokes, drinks shots, eats meat, plays a little tennis, thinks she can speak French, and so on. There were other pages, other questions, below that.

I read to her a bit of my list, and she checks herself off with a laugh. "I do eat meat, I don't smoke, I don't really drink, I do sing," she says. "I don't sing well, however." She seems to think this disqualifies her. She goes on: "Given that I can't sing like Freddie Mercury, obviously I'm not going to pursue it as a career. What would be the point?" Freddie Mercury? I admit to holding a fairly unadulterated, semi-sexual affection for the seventies icon, the mystic Indian rock-balladeer, lead singer of Queen. Kate is the first person I've known since Andi Koller, my girlfriend the summer after senior year at good old McQuaid Jesuit High School, to share with me the opinion that Freddie Mercury may be the gold-standard pop-singing voice. Fuck Michael Jackson, we had said back then. But this is the effect of this restaurant — the twist of wicker, the paroxysm of houseplants — making me act strangely like a girl, while Kate Beckinsale acts like she's got a set. Maybe we're both overcompensating — she's talking to the guy from the magazine that named her the Sexiest Woman Alive, and I'm trying to look natural eating a frisée salad. Freddie Mercury. Christ.

Sometimes Kate leans into the table — over it, really, getting very close. To anyone who's watching, it would look as if we're hatching a plan. I'm going down my list of questions, and Kate, in close like this, growls a little, her smile ever curled, and rattles off her memories like a Gatling gun, talking about growing up in West London in the eighties: "I got flashed a lot. Ten or eleven incidents in one period. I'd be flagged down, someone would ask me for directions, and I have terrible eyesight, so I'd lean into the car to look at the map, and there it was, propped up inside the road atlas."

Her younger self seems to be a character in her narrative now, someone Kate looks at as a kind of favorite niece, worthy of a few laughs in her adolescent clunkings. "I was on the cover of Elegant Bride magazine when I think I actually cried. I was looking sort of misty, bridey eyed. It was mortifying. There I was, in my riot-grrrl feminist stage, with a puppy."

She runs a finger around the neck of her water glass and listens, a kind of winsome retreat. She's more easily seen in these moments: long, not tall particularly, just lengthy — arms, fingers, legs. Strong, too. Not straight-from-the-gym, pumped-up strong. Strong like a lever.

"This whole notion of being named Sexiest Woman Alive is going to earn me quite a beating," she says. "You can't have that title with four brothers. I'll get wedgies. Headlocks. Noogies."

Seems fair, I allow. They are your brothers.

"If you're any kind of a human," she says, "you know the title is utterly ludicrous." Then she gives an on-the-other-hand nod. "But I like the idea of it, too. I do. I'm feeling that I must earn this. I need to go out and become much better at pole dancing or something."

The food comes. We eat. We offer each other bites, the way women do. She wants none of the grilled sardines in front of me. "I'm squeamish about fish," she says. "Not all fish. Just if it resembles a whole fish. Then I'm fucked."

I look down at the two sardines staring up at her from my plate and offer to send them back. She refuses. I cover their oily eyes in arugula, which just makes her laugh. "It's very visceral of you to worry," she says. "But I think it's weird if what someone else is eating bothers me. I think that's extra fussy."

I do take a spear of her asparagus. It's quite good. But as I'm eating it, it occurs to me that I'm giving in to the momentum of the venue, that I may have left my testicles in my hotel room in Mayfair. So I let myself take a long glance at Kate as she talks more about her friendships as a young woman. "I worked with Emma Thompson when I was starting out," she says. "We went out to Italy and lived together during the production of Much Ado About Nothing. And she was fairly feminist at that time, and she'd say, 'Let's not shave our armpits, because they wouldn't have done that in Shakespeare's time!' And I'd say, 'Okay!' I don't know what my boyfriend at college made of that one. Luckily he wasn't an American."

At this juncture I think she's waiting for me to giggle in agreement that American men are boors for not appreciating a woman's hairy armpit. Never mind what I am or am not, I have to put an end to this. So I act a little like a boor. I dip my head and try to get a look at her armpit right then and there. "I do now," she says, maybe slightly taken aback. Sometimes she gives the impression of pent-up energy, as if every soft part of her conceals a wire spring. She does seem as if she could pick you off from a water tower with a crossbow, then kid you about the way you landed. Yet in the very next breath, she might be a bit stricken by the sight of bones in her chicken. Capable and vulnerable.

I give her the story about the guy on the airplane, how he noticed Nothing But the Truth from one seat over, then asked to watch it, too, and how much he'd liked Kate as the hero. The fact that this movie never saw the light of day must have been the worst kind of anticlimax. Heartbreaking, even.

"It was. It's an odd thing to have this sort of spread of incredible reviews and then nobody sees it," she says. "I have prayed — prayed — for film companies to go bankrupt on films I've made, and then this happens on the one I love. Usually it's the ones you're most embarrassed about that are on the side of every bus."

She was back this fall with one she might have hoped stayed off the buses, a same-old Antarctic detective story called Whiteout, and again this winter with an arresting drama built on great performances (including hers), Everybody's Fine, with Robert De Niro. She has always worked steadily, but this may be one of the movies that stands out for her and reminds the world of her skill — like Brokedown Palace, like the otherwise lifeless Pearl Harbor, even The Aviator, in which she played a stunning Ava Gardner.

"After Nothing But the Truth, I just woke up not being able to get a hard-on for being an actor," she says, speaking from the shadow of her mane. "Now I have to surrender a little. It's over. I think my sabbatical has to be over." As she eats, small details become apparent. Her fingernails are pretty chipped up, for one thing. She makes a fist on the flat of the tablecloth, tucking her lousy manicure out of sight. I get caught looking.

"I have big hands," she says. True. Her hands are large, outsized, but lithe. Big enough that they arouse simple verbs: to wrap, to grip, to hold, to crush. It seems a natural point to ask her the punching question. Does it feel good to punch a man?

"What's dangerous about doing action movies is that I'm used to men on wires. I punch a guy and he flies over a wall. So I tend to feel like that's me that did that," she says. "Which leads me to the fact that yes, I do think I could kick your ass." Further attempted neutering from the heart of the Notting Hill Womyn's Lunch Cotillion. That's when I invite her to punch me.

"Please," I say. "As hard as you can." I ask twice.

"I could crush you like a bug," she says. It amuses her to say this. A single lock of out-of-place hair hangs over her face, bobbing in front of her mouth as she speaks. Her breath keeps it moving. Then she dips her napkin in her drinking water and presses it to her neck. And finally it is just too hot for her. She stands, unfolds to her tiptoes, slides her thighs between the tables, and eases herself through toward me. She sits down, shoulder to shoulder, out of the heat.

"I know I can't, though," she says. "Sometimes, I'll get going with my brother, we'll wrestle, and he'll hold me down. Once you're pinned by someone who weighs twice as much as you do, there really isn't much you can do except flail at the testicles with your toe. I do tend to walk around like a Chihuahua in my house. You know, one of those little dogs that sees the big dogs and starts giving them attitude? I'm a Chihuahua with the soul of a lion."

She turns her head, then does a little double take, drawing in very close to my face. Something is amiss.

"You know that gray in your eyebrow?" she says, breathing on my cheek. "If I had a Sharpie, I could take that right out for you."

The tinny revival of Steel Magnolias parades onward, and I feel increasingly like Zooey Deschanel, always the girl's best girlfriend. Even so, I can't help but blurt out, "What about my beard? It's so gray. Can you help me with that?"

She sits back and assesses the situation. Why would I ask her about this stuff? What's with all the sisterly camaraderie? "I think that's quite beyond saving," she declares. "But the eyebrow I could fix quite nicely."

I do hate the gray in my eyebrow, and I do have a Sharpie in my bag. I hand it over, so she can drag the tint along the gray hairs in my left eyebrow. "Sit still," she chides. Then she actually kneels on my chair, her knee between my legs, bites her lip, and begins working. "You're getting a woman's trade secret here," she tells me, resting her elbow on my shoulder. As she works, she asks me what I'm doing after this. I sigh and tell her that I have to buy a present for my boss's baby while I'm overseas. The girliest of errands.

"Oh, fabulous!" she says, dropping an exclamation point almost directly into my ear, since she's basically sharing the rattan chair with me now, knee to crotch, her breath on my face, her massive palm hinged on my cheekbone, a pose suggesting a lap dance by a dental hygienist. "Can I come with you then?" she says.

I give up the fight. Sometimes you have to surrender to the place you're in. That could be a thing only women know. I could use an extra pair of eyes, I tell her. I'd be pleased if she came along. And since we both noticed the cutest little baby store on that very block, we decide there's no rush. There is comfort in lingering. We order tea. Chamomile for Kate. Himalayan pear for me. We talk forever. It's delightful.