The Guardian (Charlottetown)

Beckinsale blasts plastic surgery accusation­s

- MARK DANIELL

Kate Beckinsale is fed up with online trolls who are “constantly” accusing her of undergoing plastic surgery in a bid to retain her youthful looks.

The 50-year-old Underworld star lashed out some of the comments she’s seen on her Instagram posts that claim she went under the knife following a months-long hospital stay calling the complaints “tiresome.”

“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 shared in an Instagram message alongside two clips. “These videos might be 20 years apart — maybe more,” she added alongside the videos.

“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 /being obsessed with looking younger, and it’s really such a tiresome and subtly vicious way to bully a person.”

Beckinsale continued her message by telling her 5.6 million followers that she hasn’t had any plastic surgery. “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 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,” she wrote.

The Vacancy actress added that she isn’t “too concerned about aging” after experienci­ng her own father’s death when she was just five years old.

“Life happens — obviously I have aged … 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,” she wrote. “The fact that one of the major things I am bullied about is an assumption that I can’t handle the idea of getting older is so deeply ironic when my all consuming terror was that I never thought I’d even see the end of my 20s.”

Pointing to the video, Beckinsale said that when she was in her 20s, she was “paler” and “used to pluck the s— out of my eyebrows.”

But she acknowledg­ed that sharing the videos would do little to change anyone’s mind.

“I’m posting this knowing full well that it will have absolutely no effect. It isn’t going to stop. 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.”

 ?? FILE ?? Kate Beckinsale.
FILE Kate Beckinsale.

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