Character
Flashbacks to her childhood have shown Selene to have been a normal, happy, vibrant child, born in the late 14th century. The youngest of two daughters of a master mason and smith, Selene and her sister Cecilia were shown to love painting pictures, and playing 'Silly Goose'. At the age of nineteen, the untimely and gruesome deaths of her entire family completely broke her heart, as she had loved them all dearly, and left her an orphan. The deaths of her six-year-old nieces hit her especially hard. Deceived by their murderer, Viktor, into believing that a pack of Lycans were the ones responsible, (which, given the states she found their bodies in, wasn't hard to believe), Selene dedicated herself to avenging their deaths.
As a Death Dealer, (the Vampires' fighting elite), Selene committed herself to the duty of exterminating the Lycans as a species, burying herself into her work. She would also isolate herself, never socializing with anyone outside of the Death Dealers, as the majority of the Vampire Coven are more concerned whiling away their immortal lives in hedonistic pursuits instead of concerning themselves with the serious business of the war against the Lycans.
She would also serve as one of Viktor's most loyal and most powerful Death Dealers, having been vampirically sired by him personally. While she would look up to Viktor as a surrogate father-figure, (and he-her a surrogate-daughter), she would still continue to feel the pain of her grief and loss of her family's deaths in the centuries to come.
According to Kate Beckinsale in The Making of Underworld, by the point-in-time of the events of the movie, Selene had been a soldier of the Vampire Clan for so-long, it had gotten to the point where " almost forgotten she's a woman, she's absolutely focused on revenge and killing, and she's really good at it. Then, she meets Michael, she starts to get a... kind of memory of what it's like to be human, and to be with humans. She's not completely human, but she is actually 'human' somewhere underneath there."
According to the novelizations of the events of the movies, prior to crossing paths with Michael, Selene had never been in love before, although she wasn't still a virgin; neither love nor lust had lured Selene into 'carnal encounters' with other vampires, but rather curiosity, (having been turned while still a virgin) and loneliness. Such encounters had been few, infrequent, and without consequence, all of them temporary indulgences quickly put behind her.
Read more about this topic: Selene (Underworld)
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