Kate Beckinsale 'engaged to Underworld director'

Pearl Harbour star Kate Beckinsale has become engaged to marry the director of her latest film.

A spokeswoman for the British actress gave no details of when or where the London-born beauty will wed Len Wiseman, the director of Underworld, in which Miss Beckinsale plays a vampire.

US television show Access Hollywood said Wiseman had popped the question on Saturday at a restaurant in Santa Monica, California.

It quoted a member of staff at the Viceroy Hotel next door as saying Wiseman had booked the presidential suite and filled it with lilies, the actress’s favourite flowers, to celebrate.

Beckinsale, 29, has a four-year-old daughter, Lily, with her former boyfriend, British actor Michael Sheen. She announced her split from Sheen in March after an eight year relationship.

At the time her publicists issued a statement saying no one else was involved.

The following month, she was photographed kissing Wiseman in Los Angeles International Airport.

Wiseman had directed both Beckinsale and Sheen in vampire film Underworld, which is due for release in September.

The Oxford-educated actress, who has been living in London for part of the year, is expected to move to America permanently to be near Wiseman, it was reported today.

Beckinsale is the daughter of the late British comic Richard Beckinsale and actress Judy Loe, and made her screen debut in 1993 in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing.

She has since appeared in films including The Last Days of Disco and Laurel Canyon.

In Pearl Harbour she played a US navy nurse whose love for two US army pilots breaks up their long friendship.