12 Celebrity Secret Geeks

9. Kate Beckinsale

One of Hollywood’s hottest celebrities might have some skills many geeks would kill for. She’s an awarded author who won the British bookseller W.H. Smith Young Writer’s competition TWO times in her teens, and also attended Oxford University focusing mostly on Russian and French literature.

The beautiful Brit won a prize for three short stories and once for three poems. This troubled youth was treated, and luckily cured, of anorexia, and eventually decided to pursue acting. The same year her first TV movie called One Against the Wind was released in 1991, she enrolled in Oxford University’s New College.

Even though she made a firm choice not to leave school, and pursue languages, she got her big break in Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare movie Much Ado About Nothing (1993). She attended Oxford and was filming at the same time. Now, that is praiseworthy.

Beckinsale was a member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and spent one full year in Paris as a college student. Around 2004, the prolific actress wished to return to school, when she experienced a moment of crisis.

This languages graduate wanted to go to med school. In one interview she explained her reasons, ”I’ve got this amazing doctor in England who’s a Renaissance man — he keeps bees on his balcony, he rides his motorbike through France, and he’s just one of the coolest people on the planet. I went to see him and I said, ‘I wish I’d been a doctor like you.’ He replied, ‘You absolutely could!’”

Later on, Beckinsale changed her mind due to the fact that vomit disgusts her. She’s not only a great student and actress, she’s also a great humanitarian, as she donated to British Heart Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, and hosted charity for the Women’s Cancer Research Institute. She also joined Nestlé’s efforts on awareness about the importance of children’s literacy.