The two met briefly in early childhood but didn't talk again until Kate was 21. "She got in touch and I was a bit nervous of meeting her because I wanted to get on with her. I thought, `What if she's horrible?' Luckily, she was really nice."Now that they are both in the some profession, there have been farce- like scenarios of mistaken identity with cabbies. "I don't know how she experiences it but I often get people who are bitterly disappointed.

Or the odd fan letter congratulating me on my performance in London's Burning."Happily paired off with fellow actor Michael Sheen - "Is he the one? I hope he is" - it seems unlikely Beckinsale will ever be troubled by her childhood traumas again Not that she's complacent. "As soon as you think you've sorted it out, that's when you start falling downstairs a lot."Indeed, there's an unguarded moment of panic before I leave. "Please don't let it be a `what a tragic life I've led' article. I'm not living on an estate somewhere surrounded by crack addicts, pregnant, with no future. I've been very lucky."Ah, so she's a classic swan? Still on the outside but paddling furiously underneath She beams and scoops up the cat.

"Yes, I like that."`Cold Comfort Farm' goes on general release on 25 April. Roland Barthes once remarked that in the modern world it is impossible to come across even the most natural object that has not somewhere been coded, packaged in such a way that our subsequent perception of it feels mediated. Can you think of sweetcorn without the Jolly Green Giant bumbling into your head or dream of surf without summoning up Old Spice? But however hard you tried, you could not have begun to imagine some of the objects on display in "Material Culture", the new exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery. The subtitle of the show is "The Object in British Art of the 1980s and 1990s".

With over 40 artists on show, its range is extensive; from Richard Deacon and Rachel Whiteread, who make work that belongs to a tradition of sculpture, to Damien Hirst, whose work owes as much of a debt to the disciplines of pickling and pharmacology. It doesn't attempt to group the artists together in terms of generation or as representatives of a certain British style. One space, for example, contains Anthony Gormley's cast-iron Still Falling, a cocoon-body hanging like a massive turd from the ceiling. Beside this, and attached to the wall, is Damien Hirst's striking, but comparatively restrained The Lovers - a cabinet containing jars of cow parts. And if Gormley's dense body demands to be looked at, Anish Kapoor's huge Curved Mirror on an adjacent wall completely distorts your vision, creating a hallucinatory sense of depth where there is none. The show's curators, Michael Archer and Greg Hilty, have constructed a curious narrative of objects.

As Archer explains: "There are mixtures of things, so you find echoes and refutations as you move from one gallery to the next." Take, for example, Tony Cragg's Spectrum - a jarringly pleasant rectangle of colourful, found plastic tat. It's laid on the floor right beside Gavin Turk's obscenely huge black skip, Pimp. Your initial impulse is to get a brush and pan, scoop up the bits of rubbish and stick them in the bin. It represents a continuation of his early work in which he masqueraded as a famous artist called "Gavin Turk", subverting the conventions that confer aesthetic value- the context of the gallery and the artist's signature.While Turk's shiny black streetwise skip is a bold and brash pimp, Shirazeh Houshiary's monumental black Isthmus resembles the silent monolith in 2001.