Kate Beckinsale on 'Snow Angels,' 'Pearl Harbor' and singing

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Kate Beckinsale has been in some big movies -- "Pearl Harbor," "Van Helsing," "Underworld," "The Aviator." But she's always happy to think small, as with the intimate drama "Snow Angels.""I think it keeps you muscular," she says of mixing up genres. "If you do 17 comedies in a row, I think I'd be nervous -- 'Can I do anything else?'"I want to be as good of an actor as I can be. I think that requires you to keep doing things that make you a little afraid and push yourself."Beckinsale, 34, says the scariest thing a director could ask her to do is sing."I wish I could sing," she says. "I would be so much a rock star if I could sing. That would be my ideal. But I really can't. I can just about make it through a couple of karaoke songs, but I can't trust it to sound the same every time."And she could never see herself auditioning for "American Idol," or "Pop Idol," as it's called in her native England."I think it's our version of watching people get eaten by a lion," she says. "That's what it seems like to me."In "Snow Angels," Beckinsale has it rough as a divorced mom trying to keep her distance from her ex (Sam Rockwell), even though he's still in her life because of their young daughter. The story puts the splintered couple through some rough times as parents.As the mother of a 9-year-old girl, Beckinsale says the role was "harder in the sense that it was so upsetting and easier in the sense that it's something that you worry about every day as a parent. It wasn't a comfortable place to be."She added: "I did find myself a few times, me and Sam, sitting there going, 'Some people just go to work and don't put themselves through this psychological torment. Why are we doing this? This is insanity. Why do we like this?' "Beckinsale says having her daughter with her on the shoot in Nova Scotia helped her decompress. In her free time, she'd watch such movies as "The Incredibles," "Help!" and "Some Like It Hot" with her little girl."She's into the Beatles' movies at the moment," says the proud mom. "She has good taste. 'Some Like It Hot' has been her favorite movie for several years."Beckinsale says that at 9 her favorite flick probably was "Grease." Sandy's leather outfit at the end may have been foreshadowing for one of Beckinsale's most beloved roles, Selene in "Underworld.""That's what 'Underworld' was all about, really, wasn't it?" she says. "Me working that out."Beckinsale ended up marrying her "Underworld" director, Len Wiseman."It did really take off," she says of the film. "They're making a third one now. I'm not. My husband's producing it, and actually my daughter's dad (Michael Sheen) is the lead of it. We've managed to keep this family franchise."The film that changed Beckinsale's career was "Pearl Harbor," in which she played the female lead."It was a very good script, actually, and then they didn't shoot that one," she says. "I'd never heard of (director) Michael Bay. I knew Jerry Bruckheimer had produced 'Flashdance.' But literally I was so green at the time, I had no clue. And I thought, 'Oh, it's a good script and whatever.' And off I went."I really didn't have a sense of the scale of it. I'd never done a movie of any grand scale at all. The biggest movie I'd ever done was probably, I don't know, 'Much Ado About Nothing.' Really I was out of my element. It opened my eyes really quickly."She was taken aback by the hostility from critics."It was the movie I've done that has made the most money and has been, in that respect, the most successful and the one that everyone says is the biggest disaster, so I'm still kind of confused," she says.(Contact Knoxville News Sentinel film critic Betsy Pickle at pickle(at)knews.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)