Bellucci's career illustrates your point.

She was a model, not an Oxford student. She wasn't trained on the Shakespearean stage. She's from Italy. She made more high-minded European movies because, well, that's what they make over there. Even still, she managed to show up in Brotherhood of the Wolf, which is part of this recent movement of European and Asian filmmakers to try to mimic Hollywood-style films (Shiri from Korea, France's With a Friend Like Harry, Crimson Rivers, and others.) So she's made Europe's version of the crap you're blasting Beckinsale for, and she's now catching up on her share of Hollywood crap too. Perhaps she would have done Irreversible if it wasn't her husband's film, but I doubt it. Not that it isn't in her to do, but she would have had no impetus to do something so dangerous.

I'm not completely familiar with her earliest work, but it looks to me like I can say the same thing about her that you said about Beckinsale. Basically, she started out dong small stuff until she had a chance to do larger, more commercial stuff. She worked on tiny projects, little seen foreign productions, and now she's trying to get paid just like the rest of them. I don't think she set out to be an actress just to get paid, but the point Beckinsale's defenders seem to be making is that once presented with a chance to get paid, why turn it down? Not saying that's right or wrong, but I think Bellucci is part of that same trend.

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