It’s a happy birthday to Kate Beckinsale, who turns 34 today. It took a couple years — back in the Cold Comfort Farm and Shooting Fish days — for me to get it through my thick head that her surname was actually Beckinsale, without the “d” that I apparently wanted to add before the last syllable.

Whenever
people ask about the hottest or best looking celebrities (however you
want to quantify or describe it) that I’ve interviewed, my mind will
typically fog for a split second, because the person asking usually has
a specific crush or three that they’re interested in hearing more
about. Beckinsale, though, always comes to mind in these moments.

I’ve interviewed her a couple of times — for print pieces, too, not television — and Beckinsale is criminally hot, flawlessly beautiful in a not overly made-up kind of way. It’s like looking directly at the sun, quite frankly.

But the flip side of this is that I know she split from her baby daddy, actor Michael Sheen (The Queen), which means she can’t be fallen-from-heaven perfect. So (in my accursed over-analyzation), I look at her and think, “What’s the deal?” I mean, I know she smokes, but one could get over that easily enough, right? Beckinsale is so incredibly hot that to have a man who doesn’t want to any longer be with her she must be either a dead lay, or have a seriously defective personality. Or both. And yes, yes, I know… that says a lot about me that I think that. Shoot me.