Is Kate’s fling with a toyboy revenge for her ex falling for a model 20 years his junior?
Once so refined, Ms Beckinsale, 43, now has a lover aged 21 ...
tHE kiss was straight out of central casting. He, in full control of the embrace, manfully clasps her jaw. She, tenderly submissive, is rooted to the spot, tousled hair tumbling over a bare shoulder.
Except this is no Hollywood love scene. Nor is it the usual illicit celebrity pairing of an older Alpha male caught canoodling with an ambitious young starlet.
No, the fledgling romance that is causing a stir in showbusiness circles is that between British actress Kate Beckinsale, 43, and little-known American actor Matt Rife, 21.
Those who missed the couple’s clinch outside a West Hollywood nightclub last week were given another chance to witness a very public display of affection at the weekend when the actress wrapped her arms protectively around her younger lover during a trip to the cinema and danced about him excitedly. Discreet, it wasn’t.
But then, fans of the winsome actress who was once a byword for elegance will have noticed that she has been behaving rather strangely of late.
Kate, who is 44 next month and who studied modern languages at Oxford, has recently taken to reinventing herself as a leading light in the world of shamelessly sexy selfies.
Rarely does a day pass, it seems, without the star posting attentiongrabbing pictures of herself in various states of undress.
Pop a puppy in your bra? Why not. Provocative yoga pose in the kitchen while your pet dog looks up adoringly at your nether regions? Of course.
Celebrate your daughter getting into college with a picture — not of her exam results but of you with your legs encased around your former partner and father of your child? Certainly. Dance in your undies in a loo? Doesn’t everyone?
And now, as if to mark her complete metamorphosis into a woman in the grip of a midlife crisis, there is a toyboy lover, to boot.
How to explain this outlandish pairing? Well, Matt Rife is undoubtedly a young man who is easy on the eye. But it also seems relevant to note that Ms Beckinsale — who made her name in Hollywood first with a leading role in Pearl Harbor and then through the Underworld vampire flick franchise — is recovering from serious heartache.
Her marriage to American film director Len Wiseman came to an abrupt halt just under two years ago in rather humiliating circumstances when he was seen out on a date with an ambitious model two decades his junior.
The split must have been crushing for Kate, who spent 11 years with Wiseman after falling for him when he directed her in the first Underworld film.
She ended up requiring the services of divorce super-lawyer Laura Wasser to make sure that the departing Wiseman, who she had adored, did not get his hands on any of her post- separation earnings. The divorce is ongoing.
Neither of them has commented on the split but Wiseman, 44, was spotted earlier this year shopping for furniture with his new love, CJ Franco, who is noted for raunchy topless modelling shoots and resembles, in the unfair way which so often happens, a much younger version of Beckinsale.
NOW, what’s sauce for the gander is clearly sauce for the goose, as Kate, hitherto the acme of respectability, seems delighted by her jaw-dropping, ego-boosting liaison with a young man who is — take that, Len Wiseman — a full two decades her junior.
Revenge, as many a 40- something spurned wife would no doubt testify, is a much younger dish served piping hot.
Certainly, Rife, a stand-up comedian and budding actor from Ohio, is more than a match for Kate in the Instagram stripping-off stakes, posting incessant pictures of his muscle-bound torso and soulful green eyes.
Earlier this year, he captioned a picture of himself reclining naked on a bed with the words: ‘Girl, you ready for your three minutes in heaven (foreplay included)?’
Others show him gazing at the camera and pouting in posed shots which would put even the most attention-hungry female starlet to shame. Indeed, his Instagram account paints a picture of a young man desperate for fame — and willing to do almost anything to get it.
Indeed, I can reveal that Rife said in an interview only five months ago that Kate Beckinsale is his ‘celebrity crush’ and that he hopes to marry her. A source told the TV show Entertainment Tonight that Beckinsale met Rife through a mutual pal and they are ‘officially boyfriend and girlfriend’.
The source said: ‘They quickly started flirting, went on their first date and it’s continued since. Everyone in Kate’s circle loves Matt and are so supportive of this relationship. He really is the sweetest guy and makes her so happy.
‘Her entire family thinks he is the nicest and most lovely person. He is very mature for his age.’
Whether, at 21, Rife can be expected to be any more mature than Kate’s 18-year-old daughter Lily, the product of her eight-year relationship with actor Michael Sheen, is anyone’s guess.
SO HOW on earth did Kate Beckinsale, daughter of the beloved late Porridge star Richard Beckinsale, who died when she was only five, and classical English actress Judy Loe, end up in this high-profile midlife pickle?
Beckinsale, born in leafy Chiswick, effortlessly made the leap from freshfaced West London student to Hollywood goddess 20 years ago.
Hand-picked while still a student at Oxford to play the role of Hero in Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 production of Much Ado About Nothing, Beckinsale’s natural beauty and talent marked her out as a rising star.
She fell for Welsh actor Michael Sheen in 1995, when they were both cast in a touring production of The Seagull. A RADA graduate, Sheen was already being hailed as the most sensationally talented actor of his generation.
Their eight-year relationship firmly positioned her in the earnest left-wing camp of celebrity luvvies. It was an environment to which Kate seemed naturally suited, her mother Judy having gone on to marry firebrand TV director Roy Battersby, who was greatly involved in the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Kate recalled of her youth: ‘We were selling our Trotskyist newspaper Newsline on the streets as kids.’
Kate’s early career was thoroughly respectable: she was in a TV film of Jane Austen’s Emma, with Mark Strong as her Mr Knightley. She also played the lead in a TV film of the novel Cold Comfort Farm and was in the trendy Brit-flick Shooting Fish.
Daughter Lily was born in 1999, and not long after she moved to LA to make the epic Pearl Harbor. Although the film was panned by critics, a stellar Hollywood career nonetheless followed for Kate, who began to base herself in LA.
Her romance with Sheen ended in 2003 when she took the role as Selena the vampire in Underworld — and fell for the rather more obvious charms of the director, Mr Wiseman.
Wiseman’s first wife, Dana, a kindergarten teacher, accused Wiseman of lying about when the affair with Kate began and added: ‘Kate was never nice to me — not from day one.
‘I was in Budapest for three months and Kate didn’t have a good word to say to me. Some girls know how to treat other women and some don’t.’ A year after they met, Beckinsale and Wiseman were married, her transformation from socially-minded actress to brazen Hollywood pin-up seemingly complete, with the bride pictured on honeymoon sporting a tiny pair of bikini bottoms emblazoned with the words ‘Mrs Wiseman’.
The Underworld film became a franchise, and Beckinsale found herself famous as a kick-ass action hero.
She mused: ‘I accepted Underworld on the basis that it would be terrifying, and therefore I should probably do it.
‘And, by the sequel, I had just got married, and when you’re married to a director, they’re stuck making a single movie for up to two years and it’s insanely disruptive to family life. So at least we could prolong that feeling of family togetherness.’
Alas, it was not to last for ever. And perhaps, bruised by that experience, Kate is now enjoying an uncomplicated love life without too much thought for the future.
Although Rife describes himself as
‘Outgoing. Ambitious. Silly’, he’s a man who seems to know what he wants. The youngest performer at the World Famous Laugh Factory in Times Square, New York, he has ambitions to make a transition into acting, like his comedy heroes Jim Carrey and the late Robin Williams.
His new life on Kate Beckinsale’s arm seems certain to catapult him into a more high-powered milieu.
Born in Ohio, he started working as a stand-up comedian aged only 15. ‘I was always class clown in school, making all my friends and family laugh,’ he has said. ‘So I found this comedy club and begged my mom to let me start doing the open mic there after school.
‘That little hobby snowballed into bigger opportunities and became my number one passion.’
Intriguingly, he says that he never gets nervous ‘unless there’s a hot mom in the crowd’.
And asked where he sees himself in five years he said: ‘Hopefully, I’ll be the star of my own TV show and in a number of films. All while being happily married to my celebrity crush, Kate Beckinsale.’
None of this, of course, will help Kate Beckinsale in her quest to revive her flagging career.
Unlike the other Kate (Winslet), an early foray into British period drama has not been followed by a brace of Oscars and Baftas.
Indeed Beckinsale, who appears to have made a series of questionable choices in both her personal and professional life, seems to be at something of a crossroads.
Her marriage over, her cherished only child about to leave home, her career as yet unadorned with statuettes, the British beauty may well wonder at what point she went wrong.
As she herself has said of the Underworld films, where she is known to audiences around the world as a werewolf- killing vampire: ‘Being famous for anything is quite peculiar, but being famous for the thing that is the least your sensibility is really f*****g peculiar.’
Not, perhaps, quite as peculiar as spending your 40s taking selfies in your underwear and dating a man young enough to be your son.
But then it seems that Kate gets a kick from confounding us all.