When she was five years old, her 31-year-old father died suddenly of a heart attack. While she has seen her father “more on television than I have in life,” “there are certainly enough memories for me not to feel that it’s somebody I didn’t know.” Her widowed mother moved in with director Roy Battersby when Beckinsale was nine and she was raised alongside his four sons and daughter. He wasn’t pushy, he let me come to him.” She has a paternal half-sister, actress Samantha Beckinsale, but they have never had regular contact. Beckinsale read French and Russian literature at New College, Oxford University and was later described by a contemporary, journalist Victoria Coren, as “whip-clever, slightly nuts and very charming”. 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. I was burning out and I knew I had to make a decision.” Beckinsale decided at a young age that she wanted to be an actress: “I grew up immersed in film. in 1993, Beckinsale landed the role of Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s big-screen adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. It was filmed in Tuscany, Italy during a summer holiday from Oxford University.