Kate Beckinsale clears up plastic surgery allegations and calls out her bullies.
The actress, who just returned to the red carpet after a lengthy hospital stay for an undisclosed health issue, dispelled negativity about her appearance and opened up about her “serious anxiety” about aging in a lengthy Instagram post on Sunday, May 5.
Sharing a decades-old video of her standing side by side with her husband next to a clip from one of her most recent public appearances, 50-year-old Beckinsale said: “These two videos could be 20 years apart, maybe more.”
“I don’t like talking about this because I don’t want to be part of this conversation, but I’m going to do it because any kind of insidious bullying takes its toll over time,” she began.
“Every time I post anything — which has been the case since I was about 30, by the way — I’m accused of having unrecognizable surgeries/using Botox and fillers/obsessing over looking younger,” she wrote. “It’s such a nasty and subtly vicious form of bullying.”
Beckinsale went on to say she “didn’t do any of those things.”
“I even went so far as to have a plastic surgeon specifically state that I hadn’t had plastic surgery, but she would still shout out in unison every time, ‘Oh my god, you’re unrecognizable! Oh my god, plastic surgery! Oh my god, you don’t even look like yourself!'” she wrote, adding, “It happens all the time, and it’s usually women who do it.”
The actress also said that she embraces aging, especially because she developed “severe anxiety” about death after a traumatic event in her childhood.
“Life is what it is – obviously I’m old, everyone ages; I don’t worry too much about aging – because I found out my dad died when I was 5,” she revealed, adding that “I suffered from severe anxiety and panic attacks for most of my teenage years and most of my 20s, and I almost died from a heart attack.”
Beckinsale said that during that time she was “constantly in the emergency room” and was almost “completely obsessed with anxiety.”
She added: “It’s so ironic that one of the main reasons I was bullied was because people thought I couldn’t handle the idea of getting older, when my biggest fear was that I never thought I’d make it past my 20s.”
The star then analysed the difference in her appearance in the two videos, writing that the difference in her look wasn’t due to plastic surgery, but rather to age and makeup trends.
“You can tell from the two videos that the difference is that I live in England, my skin is lighter, I pluck my eyebrows a lot and I love the brown lipstick everyone wears,” she wrote.
“My face is fuller, like most of us do in our teens and 20s. Makeup techniques are matte, not glossy like they used to be,” she continued, “I think contouring was hard for me in geography class.”
Beckinsale also admitted that the “bullying” she referenced in her post will never stop – but she hopes it does.
“I posted knowing full well that this would have absolutely no effect. It’s not going to stop,” she wrote. “But I’m also posting because, no matter what a person is like, constantly blaming them for something they didn’t do, or dwelling on their youth, when in reality, I’m just trying to get over a loss, that’s bullying.”
“Please stop it immediately.”
“It’s been a tough year,” Beckinsale told People magazine in May, speaking about her recent health at the inaugural King’s Trust Charity Gala.
“Because both of my parents are not well, my cat… has been in a lot of trouble recently,” she said. “So it’s nice to be here to see friends and talk about each other’s feelings. I think this year has been tough for everyone.”
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