Kate Beckinsale interview

In the film Beckinsale plays nurse Evelyn Johnson, who is in love with handsome pilot Rafe (Ben Affleck), but their lives change forever when the Japanese make their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.

The film has already received some criticism for glossing over the fact that the Americans were totally unprepared for the devastating attack but Beckinsale brushes that aside and says the film it gave her a new respect for the war generation.

"The nurses in those days were amazing women who had to keep everyone's spirits up, even when they were nursing badly wounded soldiers," she says.

Beckinsale is no stranger to tragedy herself. She was just six years old when her father, much-loved Rising Damp actor Richard Beckinsale, died of a heart attack at the age of 31. It had a devastating effect on her. She became anorexic when she was 15 and even now says she lives in her father's shadow.

"I find it particularly hard in England, that's why I started working in America" she explains.

"It was refreshing just to turn up on my own terms. It was great to go there and they couldn't pronounce my name, let alone know who my dad was."

Although Beckinsale has fully recovered from her illness she admits she worries about the general obsession with body image.

"There's such a pressure on women that we put on ourselves and everyone else puts on us to look unrealistic and everything, but you just can't compare yourself to people in magazines," she reasons.

"There's hours and hours of expert tweaking that goes into people looking like that. As we get more politically apathetic there seems to be all these magazines devoted to what diet the Spice Girls are following, more and more. I do think that's something that's worrying."

Beckinsale says the birth of Lily helped put her obsession with losing weight behind her. "I put on 55 pounds when I was pregnant, so I think I've done my fair share of dieting," she laughs.

Lily is also the reason the family won't be moving permanently to Hollywood despite Beckinsale's phenomenal success there.

"She's going to go to school in England and I don't want her constantly taken out of school, sitting in a trailer and becoming a Hollywood child," explains the down-to-earth mum.

In fact little Lily can take most of the credit for the fact that Beckinsale, far from being daunted by her sudden rocket to fame and fortune, seems to be taking it all in her stride.

"Whatever happens, you know, whether hardly anyone goes to see the film or if loads of people go, I'll still feel good about having done it," she says.

"That's all I can hope for. I've got a two year old daughter. I was fairly picky before but it makes you a lot more rigorous when you have to put a toddler through being in a hotel for several months."