Kate Beckinsale, at 50, knows that age is just a number, but she’s confronting a persistent public misconception head-on.
In a candid video shared on Instagram Sunday, Beckinsale addressed her online bullies, declaring that she would no longer tolerate any negative criticism about her appearance and vehemently denying plastic surgery allegations.
“I hate talking about this because I hate adding to this conversation, but I’m doing it because insidious bullying of any kind over time takes a toll,” she pleaded on social media. “These videos might be 20 years apart – maybe more.”
“Every time I post anything – and by the way, this has been the case since I was about 30 – I am accused of having had unrecognizable surgery, using Botox, using fillers, or being obsessed with looking younger, and it’s really such a tiresome and subtly vicious way to bully a person.”
Beckinsale stressed, “I don’t actually do any of those things. I’ve even gone to the trouble of having a plastic surgeon categorically state that I don’t and haven’t, and still, every time there’s a chorus of ‘Oh my God, you’re unrecognizable.’ ‘Oh my God, PLASTIC.’ ‘Oh my God, you don’t even look like yourself anymore.’ It happens constantly and it’s usually women that are doing it.”
“Obviously, I have aged. Everybody ages; I’m not too concerned about aging because I found my father dead at the age of 5,” she shared. “I spent most of my teenage years and a good deal of my 20s absolutely crippled with severe anxiety and panic attacks that I was going to die of a heart attack too, and went to emergency rooms often, and was almost, at that time of my life, completely immobilized by that anxiety.”
Beckinsale found it “deeply ironic” that she’s bullied about not being able to handle the fact that she’s getting older.
She described one of the videos in the post from when she lived in the UK and “was paler” with plucked eyebrows, and wearing “that brown lipstick that everybody wore.”
“I’m posting this knowing full well that it will have absolutely no effect. It isn’t going to stop,” she wrote. “But I’m also posting it because whatever someone looks like, accusing them constantly of things they haven’t done, or being obsessed with youth when actually, currently I’m obsessed with surviving loss, is bullying. Please stop now.”
The “Serendipity” actress recently returned to the red carpet last week after being hospitalized due to an undisclosed medical scare in March.
“It’s been a rough year,” Beckinsale told People at the inaugural King’s Trust Gala in New York City on Thursday. “Because my parents have both been unwell and my cat … it’s been a bunch of things. So that’s why it’s nice to come and see friends and have a little perspective. Everyone’s had a bit of a rough year, I think.”
On March 11, Beckinsale revealed she had been hospitalized while sending love to her mom on U.K. Mother’s Day. Two weeks later, she posted an Easter photo online from what appeared to be a hospital bed.
