In place of the star-acknowledges-lower-species nod usually meted out to press, Kate Beckinsale jumps up from the sofa, hand outstretched. "Have we met before?" she asks. She seems genuinely interested. "Your face is so familiar," she persists. I admit that my daughter and she did go to the same school - but not for long. The perfect mouth broadens into a wide, happy grin.
"That's it then!"
Her hair gleams in TV-ad perfection, yet the smile is real. As she tucks her smartly booted legs up bedside her on the sofa, she could be any young woman cosying up for a chat, not a superstar who's just finished a press conference and photo-call for 50 representatives of the press.
Beckinsale is now on the crest of a wave. Loved by the English as the daughter of Richard Beckinsale (who, although he died over 20 years ago, remains a familiar presence through regular re-runs of Porridge and Rising Damp), she is now Hollywood's latest flame, having had the doubtful privilege of single-handedly lifting Pearl Harbor from the pit of failure.
The dewy Beckinsale beauty first turned heads this side of the Atlantic in 1993 with Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. Later came high profile television drama: Cold Comfort Farm, followed by Emma, the TV version of Jane Austen's novel.
Kate Beckinsale's English Rose is in fact a cunning disguise for Kate Beckinsale Oxford Blue-stocking, who brings to her acting an intelligence that gives authority to even the most thinly written roles, and a depth and clarity to meatier parts.
The decision to go into acting was nothing to do with her father's early death - she had wanted to act and write ever since she can remember. Her mother is the actress Judy Loe (currently in Casualty) and with both parents actors, it was always hanging there in the ether, she thinks.
Her teenage years were not happy, however. As for school, she "didn't go in much. I had a nervous breakdown when I was about 16". (Anorexia and four years in therapy. "Not something I would recommend.") But young Kate kept herself together by reading and writing, to the extent that she won the W.H. Smith Young Writer of the Year Award, two years running at age 16 and 17, totally confounding her teachers who had, she says, largely written her off.
Oxford followed, where she read French and Russian, though she left without a degree.
"I did two years at Oxford, which I hated. Then I had to do a year abroad, so I went to Paris, and that was really the end of it.
"The thought of going back filled me with complete despair. I was already acting. My first summer holiday I did Much Ado, and then every holiday I did something else. So it wasn't as if I was there waiting to find out what I wanted to do, and I felt that I got out of it what I wanted. I loved the work, I loved my tutors, I loved all the literature I was doing - it was great. But I didn't ever particularly feel, 'Oh, I need a piece of paper to say that I'm clever.' Although now that I'm in America I could probably do with that - they're inclined to assume that you're silly."
Old habits die hard, however, and Beckinsale continues to be a voracious, if eclectic reader. "I'll read anything: Tolstoy, Chomsky or Posh Spice's autobiography, which Michael bought me last week as he knows I secretly love Posh Spice, and it's brilliant, really well written."
Michael is Welsh actor Michael Sheen, father of three-year-old Lily. They have been together now for seven years. "I met him doing The Seagull, which was my first play. I've done a few plays now - I did one at the Royal Court and one at the Bush - but Michael has done so many that I'm embarrassed to say how many I've done. I had a really great time doing them and I'd love to do more, and, in fact, I was asked to do one recently, but with Lily the age she is . . . I didn't want somebody else putting her to bed . . . reading stories, special cuddling and things; so I'm quite happy with things as they are."
Which means films. She has just finished shooting Laurel Canyon, a low budget independent movie with Frances McDormand. Serendipity, released this week, is a bit of an oddity: a romantic comedy co-starring John Cusack, set in pre-September 11th New York, with a feel-good quotient and coincidence overload that defies critical comment, although both Beckinsale's and Cusack's performances make it eminently watchable.
Having single-handedly saved Pearl Harbor from oblivion, isn't she now in a position to call the Hollywood shots? Beckinsale laughs. On the contrary, she says, the situation is worse than it was before Pearl Harbor.
"I was fortunate in [The Golden Bowl ]Merchant Ivory, 2000 in the sense that I had put on an awful lot of weight with Lily and hadn't really lost that much of it, so I was seen in a slightly less heroic, frumpy, slightly complicated light, which was great. I feel very much more that sort of actress than Girl Leaping From Burning Bus. But in Hollywood people's memories are very short on things like that. In the past, they said, 'Yeah, we know she's a great actress and she can do anything, but she's not really a name.' And now it's, 'she's a name, but can she actually do anything?' They don't really bring your body of work to bear on it. You're just in vogue, which is so not related to anything."
As for the downside of celebrity, Beckinsale is only too aware of the difficulties faced by those in the public eye - the strain on relationships and family. Richard Beckinsale already had one marriage behind him when Kate was born - she has a half-sister, who she only met after his death.
"I do think it is hard when you're in the same business, because you're both subject to being told you have to fly off somewhere three days from now, and it's very hard to make plans and keep the family structure. Lily is still very portable and that's great, and she comes with me where ever I go. Michael has had a few absences which he found really difficult. I have never left her with anybody that she doesn't know really, really well.
"My best friend or my mother comes along too. She'll hang out on the set, then go off to toddler classes at the back, so I don't really think she has the sense that I work at all."
Although Beckinsale currently spends as much time in Los Angeles as she does in London, that will end in little over a year. "Lily is going to go to the primary school that I went to. That's the plan for the moment. But I've found since I had her that you do have to keep a fairly relaxed attitude to your plans - you don't know what having a five year old's like when you've got a three year old. Everything's very different. Ideally, I'd much rather she was over here. Also, I've only got the one parent, so it's not OK for me to spend that much time on the other side of the world. I've got a brilliant step-father, but I think when you've lost one parent you don't like to be living 11 hours away from the other one for a very long stretch."
The filmstar thing is all very well, but Beckinsale happily admits she would much rather be being interviewed for having won the Whitbread.
"I stopped writing regularly when I went to Oxford because there was such a volume of essays and work to be handed in. And after that I got heavily into rushing around doing films, having my big relationship, and setting up home and stuff; and then, just as I was thinking of getting back into writing, I managed to get pregnant. And I thought, 'Oh well, once I've got the baby, I'll be at home and . . . like an idiot I didn't have a clue that it would take me until 4.30 p.m. to even get myself dressed. So I really want to get back to it because I feel that's where my major talent lies. But it's that frightening thing about writing: if you haven't done it for a while you fear it's gone away."
The one thing she will miss about the US is the anonymity - the not being seen primarily as Richard Beckinsale's daughter.
"When I was a teenager, I felt very close to him, very intrigued by him." He died when she was just five. "It's wonderful that he's so loved here, but it's actually very nice not to be in his shadow, not to be thought to be riding on his coat-tails - to be somewhere where they don't know who he is."
Serendipty is on general release
Eddie Holt writes on 40 years of RT╔: Weekend 16