Kate Beckinsale Won’t Micromanage Daughter Lily’s Acting Career: “It's Really Important To Her To Have Her Own Thing And Blaze Her Own Trail”

Kate Beckinsale won't force acting advice on her daughter.

The Van Helsing actress is delighted 22-year-old Lily Sheen — who she has with former partner Michael Sheen — has landed a role alongside Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent but insisted she'll only give her career tips "when asked".

She said: "I'm not calling her up and saying, 'Now, I've got a pearl of wisdom, get ready! It's been very important to me to be very independent in that respect."

The 48-year-old Underworld star admitted it is "difficult" not to get involved in her daughter's "business" but she thinks her offspring has made the right moves for her own career by switching to her paternal surname to get some distance from being compared to Kate, particularly because they look alike.

"I think, you know, it's onerous enough to sort of look like me, you know, and me being her mother anyway and her having the same name. She's been asked since she was about three months old like, 'Oh, are you going to be an actress like your mother?'

"I think it's really important to her to have her own thing and blaze her own trail and do her own stuff.

"So as much as it's quite difficult not to kind of be poking into her business all the time, I really do respect that and I admire how much she wants to be independent from us."

Kate herself is currently starring in Guilty Party, a dark comedy for Paramount+ in which she plays a disgraced journalist trying to revive her career with the story of a woman who claims to have been falsely jailed for her husband's murder.

After working on the show, which also stars Brian Cox, she's found herself adopting a "disturbing" new habit.

She said: "We're all watching true crime avidly! And what I find quite disturbing is when I'm really homesick, I'm looking up British serial killers now. It's so weird. I am one of those women who find it comforting and worries about all that." — BANG SHOWBIZ

Photos: TPG News/Click Photos, Kate Beckinsale/Instagram