When Kate Beckinsale was invited to her daughter's Los Angeles school to talk about her profession, she might have been expected to stand up and wax lyrical about the joys of Hollywood stardom and the hat-trick of thrillers she will appear in later this year.
But nine-year-old Lily had other ideas.
"She told me that I wasn't allowed to talk about my own job, because it is apparently very embarrassing to her," explains the 34-year-old actress.
"But I was allowed to come and talk about being British, which was nice."
It's hard to imagine what those classmates thought, sitting there listening to an A-list actress modestly chatting about Marks & Spencer and Topshop and her old life in west London, but the talk fitted in rather well with Beckinsale's determination to shield Lily from the typical Los Angeles showbiz lifestyle.
"She has a very strong British accent and when people ask where she's from she always says Chiswick, which is funny because it's been quite a while since we lived there," says Beckinsale.
In fact it has been five years since Kate swapped Britain for California, but she claims that her life there with film-director husband Len Wiseman and their daughter is as unstarry as can be, despite recently being photographed out with the Sunshine State's most famous newcomers - the Beckhams.
"I don't feel like I've got much of a Hollywood life," she insists. "I do lead a relatively quiet life with Len and Lily in LA. Len and I don't go to fancy clubs very often. I'm usually too exhausted with a young child and I don't want a hangover."
And at the forefront of her mind at all times is her determination that her daughter, from her previous relationship with Welsh actor Michael Sheen, will grow up filled to the brim with self-esteem and confidence, because, as she puts it, "I really didn't."
To that end, she seems to have managed, against the odds, to maintain a good relationship with Sheen despite abandoning their nine-year relationship and running off with 35-year-old Wiseman, who directed them both in the vampire film Underworld.
It was a situation that had the potential for complete disaster. As it turned out, however, all three participants have remained the very best of friends.
"Michael and Len are both very good people," she explains simply. "And I think we were really clear that the most important thing for Lily was for everyone to be cool about things and let her have the benefit of having us all still around her.
It required everybody to compromise and nobody to have a giant ego, and that's what happened."
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Priority: Kate with daughter Lily, from her previous relationship with Michael Sheen
On top of that, she adds of Sheen, "He is one of the most thoughtful, principled people and Lily is so lucky to have him as a dad. Lily is our priority. I think we're incredibly lucky in the situation we have and Lily doesn't have any scars from that, which is important to me.
"In fact, she has two fathers, which makes her childhood much different from mine, because I didn't even have one.’
Her own father, actor Richard Beckinsale, died in 1979 when she was only five and a half.
The star of sitcoms such as Porridge and Rising Damp was only 31 and suffered a massive heart attack in his sleep.
"It was so sudden. He just went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up again," recalls Beckinsale. "I don't really remember having any conversations with him. I do have memories, but when you're that young, you're not really at the conversational stage of a relationship. He's still such a huge figure in England, which I find moving and impressive all these years later, but at the time, I used to get him confused with both God and John Lennon because John Lennon died a couple of years later, and I remember getting the whole thing a bit mixed up."
The one who bore the brunt of the experience, she adds, was her mother, actress Judy Loe.
"My mother had me at a similar sort of age as I was when I had Lily, and I feel so blessed not to have to deal with what she had to," says Beckinsale.
"She had trouble with having children, and she was in hospital coming out of a nine-hour operation to see if she could have any more when she was told that my father had died. She was a widow at 31, and she was an only child, and by that time her parents had died, too.
My mother and I have always been incredibly close, but I think the thing I learned from my childhood is that it's almost impossible to raise a child in a secure way without some sort of support system around you. That's why all the people I have around Lily are incredibly important to me. Len, Michael, Michael's parents and my mother. Lily has an amazing community surrounding her which I didn't have - and that is why she is much cooler and much less weird than I was myself as a child."
Indeed, much of her childhood was spent reeling from the tragedy and the ensuing upheaval within her family. Four years after her father's death, her mother, Judy, moved in with TV director Roy Battersby and his four teenage sons.
As an only child, Kate recalls feeling 'invaded', adding that her teen years were a 'terrible time'. By the age of 11 she was in therapy and at 15 she was anorexic - at her lowest point she weighed just five stone and chain-smoked.
"Let's just say that it wasn't a great period of my life," she says quietly.
And yet despite the traumas of her early life, she did well at her private all-girls school, Godolphin and Latymer in west London, and won a place at New College, Oxford, to read French and Russian. But her academic pursuits were cut short during her first year by Kenneth Branagh, who tempted her away to play Hero in his film version of the Shakespearean comedy, Much Ado About Nothing.
She went on to play Flora in Cold Comfort Farm, the title role in Jane Austen's Emma, and Alice in Through The Looking Glass, making a name for herself as a very English actress with an accent that could cut glass. Then she made the jump to Hollywood with the 2001 flop Pearl Harbor, which was followed by the Vampire thriller Underworld in 2003 - that fateful film where she met her future husband.
By then, she and Sheen had been together for nine years. She was 21 when they met while appearing in Chekhov’s The Seagull, and she said then that Sheen had saved her from 'a hospital for the criminally insane'.
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Instant attraction: Kate met director Len Wiseman when they worked together on Underworld
The arrival of Lily Mo in 1999 seemed to cement their relationship and Beckinsale famously claimed that she couldn't imagine kissing anyone else again.
But that was before she met Underworld's handsome American director, Wiseman. The
attraction was instant and electric - even though Sheen, rather awkwardly, happened to be the other star of the movie.
Now she insists of Wiseman, "I knew within five minutes of kissing him that I'd marry him."
"It was one of those things," explains Beckinsale, "that was happening but that we tried to pretend was not happening for a long time. Len and I were both with other people at the time, and the whole thing was really difficult. We made the film, and it wasn't until after it had finished that it finally dawned on me how much I liked him. And you don't necessarily find the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with the first time out of the gate. Len and Michael got along very well before Len and I got together because they already had a good working relationship, and they both liked each other
anyway."
Inevitably, walking away from her long-term partner and the father of her child added a few thorns to Beckinsale's English rose image.
"There was never anything interesting about me before," she says. "I had a baby and stayed home a lot. I'd never been drunk, never dated anyone famous, never been in a bar with a sleazy producer and a line of cocaine. I was home with a rubber duck and a nappy." But it didn't do her career any harm. She starred in 2004 Dracula film Van Helsing, played opposite Leonardo di Caprio as Ava Gardner in The Aviator the same year, and squeezed back into her black PVC outfit to reprise the role of vampiress Selene in Underworld: Evolution in 2006.
This year she has five films coming out - four thrillers - Winged Creatures, Nothing But The Truth with David Schwimmer and Alan Alda, and Whiteout, co-starring Tom Skerritt - as well as family drama Snow Angels.
In not one of them, she says with relief, is she required to wear a corset or look particularly glamorous.
"It's nice when the most important thing about your character is not how she looks in her clothes," she says. Not that you can imagine Beckinsale looking bad in anything.
She once rather unkindly described herself as "a twig with a bottom and small breasts". But while she clearly works hard to keep herself in shape, she insists none of it comes naturally. "I have to be dragged to the gym," she says. "All I ever did at school was bunk off PE and go and smoke cigarettes in the loo. I would never even run for a bus. I'd get a taxi. It's one of those things you have to do, especially if one wants to work in this town."
But if Beckinsale has successfully embraced the LA lifestyle, she still feels British through and through.
"I'm actually feeling somewhat deranged right now because I haven't been home for a year and a half, which is the longest I've ever gone without a visit," she says. "But I suppose that's what you get for working so hard. I'm still a foreigner here. I always will be, but that's okay. I'm used to living in London or New York or Paris, where it’s possible to walk out of your house and find interesting and surprising things happening all around you. But here in Los Angeles, there’s basically a freeway and that's it. Nobody walks anywhere."
It doesn't help, she adds, that even after five years, she has yet to learn to drive.
"I haven't had time!" she wails, mock-despairingly. "People keep telling me I'm insane to live here and not drive, but then I say to them - look, you spend a couple of weeks with me, and then show me the few spare hours I can responsibly take to learn how to do it. I'm busy all the time, making movies, raising my daughter - I just can't fit it in. Luckily, my husband still likes me enough to give me lifts wherever I need to go, and hopefully that will last for much longer."
Perhaps the greatest advantage of living in LA, however, is that it has allowed her to put her past behind her and reinvent herself. As Beckinsale puts it, "I've got much more of a history in England. No one really knows who I am or where I came from in America, and there's something quite nice about that."
