Kate Beckinsale claims her phone was tapped as a young girl.

She said: "Roy did a documentary called The Palestinian with Vanessa Redgrave, and consequently our phones were tapped growing up. After he was blacklisted by the BBC, me and my girlfriends would be on the phone talking, you know “bum, willy, fanny”, and we’d hear the little click on the phone as the listener came on. And you can imagine some spook somewhere trying to crack the “bum-willy-fanny” code!"

And the 42-year-old actress - who has 17-year-old daughter Lily with her former partner Michael Sheen - also admitted she was treated as a "highly suspicious character" when she moved from the United Kingdom to Los Angeles - but for a different reason.

She told The Guardian newspaper: "That was a time when any British actor coming out to Los Angeles was a highly suspicious character. It made you seem insanely ambitious, like a perfectly obvious character flaw. It was a real prejudice 20 years ago and I think I hit it right at its peak. But evidently I was very ahead of my trendy game in coming over here that early, because now everyone’s here and it’s perfectly normal.

"I think the person who got it the worst was Catherine Zeta-Jones. Everyone was like, 'Oh, what is she doing - she must be such a shark!' And I don’t know her at all, but I know none of that was fair to her. Nowadays it’s really not such a stretch, in London, to imagine what being in LA might be like. The point is, if you’re going to be an arsehole in London, you’re going to be an arsehole in LA, too."