The dark truth that drove Kate Beckinsale to abandon her Oxford degree
Beauty, brains and t alent to burn – but at a university awash with drink and drugs. Now, as she considers a return to her alma mater, we reveal...
WITH beauty, talent a n d Ho l l y wo o d success, Kate Beckinsale has led a life that most would consider to be charmed. Yet the actress has long felt there was a piece of the puzzle still missing – which is why at the age of 48 she is considering making a return to Oxford University in order to complete the degree she abandoned as a young woman.
‘I took my kid to my college and my French tutor was still there,’ Kate said recently. The kid she refers to is Lily, her 22- year- old daughter with actor Michael Sheen.
‘My tutor said, “You know you can come back any time?” ’
The three years Kate spent at 14th Century New College have mostly been forgotten amid the glamour of her subsequent achievements, which include starring roles in the films Pearl Harbor and Serendipity.
Even at the time, it was assumed that her decision to leave Oxford in 1994,
My friends had been expelled and there was a whiff of death everywhere
before her final year, was the result of conflict between her academic studies and an already blossoming acting career.
Kate was still at Oxford when Sir Kenneth Branagh made her a star by casting her in his film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.
‘It was getting to the point where I wasn’t enjoying either thing enough because both were very high-pressure,’ Kate has said in the past.
But there was another, darker reason for turning her back on Oxford, as she has now acknowledged. And it has cast a shadow over everyone involved.
Although fully occupied with acting and studying, Kate had found herself part of a highflying social set whose hedonism echoed that of Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte.
Privately educated and privileged, this group drank and took illegal drugs – until the gilded edifice came crashing down one night in 1992 with the traumatic death of one of Kate’s closest friends.
‘My friends were party people and I wasn’t,’ she recalled.
‘ They’d all moved into a house and I stayed in the college, where I then got mono [mononucleosis, or glandular fever], and went home.
‘ While I was home, one of my dear friends there ended up jumping out of a window and dying.
‘ All my ot her f r i ends were rusticated – basically expelled for a year and then you come back. When I was considering going back, nobody was there and there was this horrible whiff of death everywhere. That was the reason why I didn’t go back.’
That friend was Henry Skelton, a 21-year-old fine arts undergraduate, aspiring musician and artist, whose promise was cut short when he fell to his death from a secondfloor college room after taking a cocktail of champagne, tequila and the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
The senseless death l eft the group shattered. Henry’s girlfriend, Dominique De Bastarrechea, and two of his friends were expelled for a year following the episode. Judge’s daughter Georgia Gwynne-Griffiths was jailed for nine months for supplying drugs. For Kate, the terrible incident had macabre echoes of an episode of Inspector Morse, the Oxford-based TV detective series directed by her stepfather Roy Battersby in 1991, in which a brilliant student dies during an exam.
It sealed her decision to focus on acting and put the now- tainted memories of Oxford firmly behind her.
By the time she arrived to study French and Russian
literature in 1991, Kate had already experienced a degree of privilege, but sadness, too.
The daughter of two well-established actors, Richard Beckinsale and Judy Loe, she grew up in leafy Chiswick, West London, and attended the independent Godolphin and Latymer school for girls. Family friends included Vanessa Redgrave and director Ken Loach.
Of course, the defining event of her childhood was the premature death of her father, the much-loved star of Porridge and Rising Damp, at the age of 31. Kate was just five at the time and ‘started expecting bad things to happen’.
At 15, she suffered a breakdown and developed anorexia.
Her talent shone through, all the same. As a teenager, Kate won her first television part in an adaptation of P. D. James’s Devices And Desires detective novel, making her a minor celebrity among fellow students even by the time she had arrived to start her degree.
Television presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, who was at Oxford at the same time, described Kate as ‘whip-clever, slightly nuts and very charming’.
More television parts followed at Oxford, as well as a role in a production of Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge, directed by future King’s Speech director Tom Hooper. She met fellow actor Edmund Moriarty and fell in love, dating him for two years while she juggled acting and her studies.
But some at the university were still notorious for bouts of debauchery at the time.
The Bullingdon Club, which at that point included George Osborne and Boris Johnson’s brother Jo, was in full, alcohol-fuelled swing.
It was only six years earlier that Olivia Channon, the daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s then Transport Secretary Paul Channon, had died in her sleep after taking heroin at a student party.
Kate’s friends at New College shared her artistic temperament, but while she devoted ever more energy to her burgeoning career, some in her circle began to experiment with drugs.
Among them was Henry Skelton, a shy and sensitive soul, who was not only a gifted artist but also a talented violinist. He had previously won a music scholarship to Marlborough College, the boarding school later attended by the Duchess of Cambridge.
Henry had struggled emotionally since his parents’ separation, however, and was needlessly racked with doubts about his abilities. In fact, he was regarded highly by his tutors. He was also worried about
his relationship with his girlfriend Dominique. Then on the evening of December 1, 1992, Henry decided – disastrously – to take LSD for only the second time.
His first experience of the drug had been just the previous night and it hadn’t agreed with him. But in the company of his good friends, he tried again.
The drugs had been bought by Dominique and her American friend and fellow student, 20-yearold James Merino. They paid £ 10.50 for three ‘ tabs’ of LSD, then returned to their rooms in New College Lane.
There, they were joined by Henry and fellow student Joel Roderick, 20. Together, t hey shared t he drugs and a bottle of champagne, washing it down with tequila.
Fearful that Henry was feeling suicidal, the students, who were all in their second year, had tried to stay awake by talking to him but they later dozed off.
While they slept, Henry went into the neighbouring room.
By the time they woke up, it was too late. Henry had climbed through a 2ft-wide second-floor window and fallen 25ft head-first.
Shortly afterwards, James walked into the room to see the sash window open and his friend’s body lying on the ground below.
The trio alerted police and Henry was rushed to the intensive care unit at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, but he died three hours later from multiple injuries.
At an inquest, James said he thought his friend might have committed suicide after he had admitted writing his own obituary two weeks earlier.
‘I was very surprised,’ he said. ‘It occurred to me that he might be about to commit suicide. I realised I had my key and went in. The room was empty and the sash window was pushed up.
‘It is based on my knowledge of him and him telling me about his obituary and things I have discovered since.
‘There were a lot of things he was depressed about. I know he felt very insecure about relationships and his artwork.’
However, Dominique believed that it was the LSD that had made him depressed.
‘It made him quite fatalistic in a way and I think he might have been thinking like that,’ she later said, adding that Henry had never talked about suicide and ‘seemed to enjoy life’.
The Oxfordshire coroner recorded an open verdict after pathologist Dr Ian Buley said Henry died from severe head injuries. Urine tests revealed he had taken ‘nine times an effective dose of LSD’.
The pathologist added that the drug is ‘known to promote or accentuate suicidal feelings’.
Henry’s death was a salutary lesson for his three friends, who were all sent down for a year after appearing before a university disciplinary committee.
It was devastating, too, for the woman who had sold the drugs.
Georgia Gwynne-Griffiths, the daughter of a leading QC, had already graduated with a 2:1 in Law from St Edmund Hall.
Now she was back at Oxford to do a business st udies course and was having a ‘last crazy binge’, as she later put it, before starting her career.
She was in a l ect ure when police arrived to question her about 1.5oz of amphetamine found in her room and the tabs of LSD she had sold.
Pleading guilty to possessing the LSD and amphetamine sulphate with intent to supply, she was s entenced t o ni ne months in jail. Her dreams of a legal career were crushed.
I n an i nterview after being released from New Hall prison in Wakefield, she said: ‘ As I was leaving the station, one of the policemen said, “By the way, you may like to know that last night a young man who took some of the acid you sold jumped to his death.”
‘As I took in those words, it was as though I was falling backwards: a young man dead and the finger of guilt pointing at me. Outside the station it was pitch-black and pouring with rain. I don’t know why, but I started running with tears streaming down my face.
‘ For the first time in my life there was nothing I could do to take away what was happening.
‘No one could help me – not my parents, not anyone. I was completely on my own. A man had died and I was apparently involved in some way. From that day my life became hell.’
After Henry’s death, Oxford pledged to clamp down on drug use at the university. A survey revealed that 40 per cent of students there had taken illegal substances.
The university also promised to improve student welfare after a
A young man had died and I was involved – from that day my life was hell
Kate’s beauty and perfect performance marked her out as a new star
report revealed that undergraduate suicide had become a ‘cause for concern’ and recommended improvements in official counselling services.
Kate Beckinsale, meanwhile, was safely at home, recuperating from her bout of glandular fever.
A few months later she flew to Tuscany to film Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing.
When Kate attended the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in Doc Martens, she was hailed for her sweetness and natural beauty, while her perfectly judged performance also marked her out as a major new talent.
As a foreign language student, Kate spent her third year – 1993-94 – studying in Paris, where she appeared in the French language film Marie-Louise Ou La Permission. But when it came time to return for her fourth and final year, the loss of her friend made the idea of returning to New College unbearable. She never went back.
Shortly afterwards, she confirmed her status as a rising star with the role of Flora Poste in the film Cold Comfort Farm.
Kate would go from strength to strength, graduating from appearing in smaller British films to Hollywood blockbusters.
After splitting from her then partner Michael Sheen, she married director Len Wiseman and made a series of vampire films with him. The couple divorced in 2019. Since then, she has been linked to a string of younger men, including American comedian Pete Davidson.
Now, it seems, she may finally be ready to return to Oxford, lay to rest the memory of her friend’s tragic death and finish the degree she began all those years ago.
And, a s she said r e c e n t l y, contemplating her decision to leave: ‘I remember, at the time, thinking, “It’s such a shame university is at this time of your life when you’re thinking, Who should I get off with and am I a lesbian and what posters do I want on my wall?”
‘ Wouldn’t i t be better, once you’ve actually lived a bit, to go, “I really like this”?’