Getting to Know Keira Knightley - At 40

As Keira Knightley turns 40, Cinema Paradiso looks back over a career that has consistently defied the snipes of the gutter press.

With the clock ticking on a meteorite catastrophe in Lorene Scafaria's Seeking a Friend For the End of the World (2012), Penny confides in travelling companion Dodge, 'I was totally going to peak at 40.'

There seems little danger of that age being the limit for Keira Knightley. Despite having spent the last 34 years in front of the camera, she is still seeking to crack the secret of acting and keeps choosing projects that will challenge her intellectually and refine her skills. She views what she has already achieved with some satisfaction, but sees no reason why the best might not still be to come.

'E' Before 'I'

Londoner Will Knightley met Glaswegian Sharman Macdonald when they were members of the left-leaning 7:84 theatre company. They married in 1976 and welcomed a son, Caleb, three years later. Although she had TV credits in Within These Walls (1974-78), Shoestring (1979-80), and The Gaffer (1981-83), Macdonald struggled in the theatre because of stage fright. So, she decided to turn her hand to writing because of a bet.

As she later recalled: 'I was desperate for a second child. Desperate never to act again. Most of all desperate to stop eating lentils, French bread and tomatoes. We were broke, Will and me. We had one child. My hormones were screaming at me to have another. So. Will bet me a child for the sale of a script.'

She partially based When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout on games that Caleb played with his friends. But nobody seemed interested in the play until Alan Rickman, who was moonlighting as a script reader, found it in a pile of manuscripts and recommended it to the Bush Theatre, where it opened to acclaim in 1984 and earned the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright.

Keira Christina Knightley was duly born in Teddington on 26 March 1985. As Will was a big fan of Soviet figure skater Kira Ivanova, they decided to name their daughter, Kiera. However, Macdonald misspelt the name when she applied for a birth certificate and they decided to stick with Keira.

A film studio had been built at Teddington Lock in 1910 and Warner Bros purchased the lot in 1931 to produce Quota Quickies. Among them was Errol Flynn's first starring vehicle, Ralph Ince's Murder At Monte Carlo (1934), which is sadly considered lost. By 1985, the studio was home to Thames Television, which made it handy for Will, who continued to take work wherever he could find it. Cinema Paradiso users can keep an eye out for him in such small-screen productions as Peter Duguid's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982), Graham Theakston's The Mill on the Floss (1996), Peter Kosminsky's The Project (2002), and Simon Curtis's A Short Stay in Switzerland (2009), as well as in episodes of A Touch of Frost (1992-2010), Heartbeat (1992-2009), Cracker (1993-96), Peak Practice (1993-2002), Kavanagh QC (1995-2001), Midsomer Murders (1997-), The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2001-07), Foyle's War (2002-15), and Rosemary & Thyme (2003-05).

Macdonald continued to write, following the novels, The Beast (1986) and Night Night (1988), with three more plays, The Brave, When We Were Women (both 1988), and All Things Nice (1991). In 1997, Alan Rickman acquired the rights to make his directorial debut with The Winter Guest, which starred Phyllida Law and her daughter, Emma Thompson, who had become the young Keira's hero.

She had been diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of six and continued to struggle with reading, as she passed from Stanley Junior School to Teddington School. However, Macdonald found a way of coaxing her daughter into persisting with her struggle. As Knightley later explained: 'I'm a huge fan of Emma Thompson. Huge. And my mum, who worked with her mum on Sense and Sensibility, got me a copy of the screenplay Emma had written. It was like my treasured possession. And I was - am? - dyslexic, and all the way she got me over it was to say: "If Emma Thompson couldn't read, she'd make f***ing sure she'd get over it, so you have to start reading, because that's what Emma Thompson would do."'

The young Keira was very much inspired by her parents, however, and announced at the age of three that she wanted to act. As her teacher thought that drama might be an incentive to help with her reading, her parents agreed to letting Keira get an agent at the age of six and she launched her career with a cereal commercial.

'I do remember, at six, thinking I should be earning my own living,' Knightley once joked in Vogue. 'My mum says I was born 45.' She made her acting bow as Angela in Ferdinand Fairfax's Royal Celebration (1993), which was set against the backdrop of the Charles-Diana wedding and aired as part of the Screen One series. Having been Sheena Rice ('I stole some coins and found a dead body') in the 1994 'Swan Song' episode of The Bill (1984-2010), she was cast as Natasha Jordan in Moira Armstrong's adaptation of Joanna Trollope's A Village Affair (1995), in which Sophie Ward and Nathaniel Parker played her parents and Claire Bloom her grandmother.

Agatha Christie's Towards Zero was the source of Patrick Dewolf's Innocent Lies (1995), which saw Knightley make her feature bow as the young Celia Graves (Gabrielle Anwar), as detective Alan Cross (Adrian Dunbar) travels to the French coast in 1938 to meet an expat British family involved with Fascism and murder. This was followed by Juliet May's tele-adaptation of Edith Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers (1996), an all-star family adventure that featured Knightley as a princess - although the 11 year-old was far more obsessed at the time with Al Pacino in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974). That said, she also adored Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939).

Peter O'Toole and Joanna Lumley led the cast in Coming Home (1998), a mini-series based on a Rosamunde Pilcher bestseller that had Knightley play the young Judith Dunbar (Emily Mortimer) in mid-30s Cornwall. She also appeared as Rose Fleming Maylie, the aunt of the title character, in three episodes of Renny Rye's ITV take on Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1999). But the year would also see Knightley cast in a small role in a massive film that would raise her profile overnight.

Blockbusters

Coming 22 years after George Lucas's last directorial outing, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) was a major cinematic event and 12 year-old Keira Knightley found herself part of the ballyhoo. She was chosen to play Sabé, Padmé Amidala's handmaiden and decoy, because of her close resemblance to Natalie Portman. By all accounts, when they were fully made up, even their own mothers couldn't tell them apart. But, while Knightley appears in the film, her voice isn't heard, as her lines were dubbed by Portman, who was only 16 herself at the time of filming.

According the gossip, Jessica Alba, Jaimie Alexander, and Amanda Bynes were considered for the role of Elizabeth Swann when Disney decided to make a film from one of its most popular theme park attractions. As buccaneering pictures had become box-office poison since the swashbuckling heyday of Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster, most insiders expected Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) to flop. But Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow caught the public imagination and Knightley became an international star as his damsel in anything but distress. As she hadn't been asked to do any special training before the shoot, she thought she would be more decorative than active. But she wound up spending two days standing on a plank and refused to let her stunt double perform the leap into the water.

While preparing to play Gwyn in Peter Hewitt's Disney teleplay about the daughter of Robin Hood, Princess of Thieves (2001), Knightley had spent several weeks learning to ride, fence, and fire arrows. However, she was required to refine her swordfighting skills when she was called back in 2004 for the back-to-back shooting of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007).

Despite being reunited with Depp, Orlando Bloom, and Geoffrey Rush, Knightley found the assignments taxing. Indeed, when asked by GQ about her memories, she had declared: 'Wet. Wet and hot. A lot of wet. The second two took two years, but in my memory, they've just been mushed into a big, hot, wet thing. When we started shooting the third one, there was no script. You'd shoot a close-up, and you'd literally be given a speech written on a scrap of paper and told: "Say that." You'd go, "OK, but where am I? And what does this mean?" And they'd go: "Don't worry about it; just say it." It was mental. You get a lot of criticism, and there aren't really any excuses, but I found that difficult.'

An exhausted Knightley reportedly fell asleep during the premiere of At World's End, by which time she had announced that she didn't want to appear in any further sequels. She has claimed that she still hasn't seen the film all the way through. Moreover, as she never revisits her work, she doesn't have any of her films on disc. Should she need to see something on DVD, Blu-ray, or 4K, however, she knows where to come. Perhaps she could catch up with her cameo at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (aka Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge, 2017) ?

Such was the toll taken by working on such high-profile films, while also being harassed by the paparazzi and ridiculed by certain critics that Knightley took a two-year break. Even then, the speculation continued about the state of her relationship with fellow actor, Rupert Friend, after she had previously dated Del Synnott and Jamie Dornan. Worse still, she was forced to sue the Daily Mail in 2007 after the tabloid had implied she had been suffering from an eating disorder.

In 2018, Knightley revealed in The Hollywood Reporter that she had endured a nervous breakdown and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at the age of 22. 'That run of films was completely insane,' she recalled, referring to the first few years of her career. 'It's amazing looking back at it from the outside - you're like, "Woah, that was hit after hit after hit!" But, from the inside, all you're hearing is the criticism, really. And, also, I was aware that I didn't know what I was doing, you know? I didn't know my trade, I didn't know my craft. I knew that there was something that worked sometimes, but I didn't know how to capture that.'

She continued, 'I literally felt like I was worthless. I felt pretty much like actually I didn't exist and I was this weird creature with this weird face that people seemed to respond to in quite an extreme way, and I couldn't quite figure any of it out.'

Following therapy, Knightley felt able to resume work with a new confidence. However, she has subsequently steered clear of blockbusters, although she did play Dr Cathy Muller, the estranged wife of the hero (Chris Pine) in Kenneth Branagh's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), the fifth entry in a series spun off from the novels of Tom Clancy that also includes John McTiernan's The Hunt For Red October (1990), Philip Noyce's Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), and Phil Alden Robinson's The Sum of All Fears (2002).

Here and Now

Having played a jogger in Roger Ashton-Griffith's short, Deflation, which her mother co-edited, Knightley was cast in Nick Hamm's The Hole (both 2001). Adapted from a psychological horror novel by Guy Burt, the story centres on four classmates - Liz Dunn (Thora Birch), Mike Steel (Desmond Harrington), Geoff Bingham (Laurence Fox), and Frankie Smith (Knightley) - who hide in an abandoned nuclear bunker to avoid going on a field trip to Wales. As she was only 15 at the time, Knightley had to get clearance from her parents for certain scenes.

Knightley stayed in school for an uncredited bit as a music student in Pete Hewitt's Thunderpants before testing herself in Gillies MacKinnon's Pure (both 2002) as Louise, a pregnant waitress who helps 10 year-old Paul (Harry Eden) to wean his widowed mother, Mel (Molly Parker), off heroin. The film was set in the East End of London, which suited Knightley as she is fan of West Ham United. Indeed, Paul's hero is David Beckham and he would play an part in reinforcing Knightley's burgeoning reputation in her next picture.

A tomboy with a rebellious streak, Knightley had been part of a protest at school to allow girls to play football and she spent the summer after sitting her GCSEs playing Jules Paxton alongside Parminder Nagra's Jesminder Bamhra in Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Cinema Paradiso users can read all about the Hounslow Harriers in The Big Match: Gregory's Girl v Bend It Like Beckham.

A busy year ended with Knightley appearing in a pair of shorts (no, not that kind), as Leah in Col Spector's New Year's Eve and as Helena in Roger Lunn's The Seasons Alter (both 2002), which was inspired by William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. She began 2003 by voicing Kate, a British student in Japan, in Fumi Inoue's animated short, Gaijin. As is frustratingly the way with short films, these aren't easy to see. The same can't be said of Richard Curtis's Love Actually (2003), although the storyline involving Juliet (Knightley), fiancé Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and besotted best man Mark (Andrew Lincoln) has recently been singled out for censure in some quarters for the latter's stalkerish persistence. Nevertheless, Knightley reprised the role in Red Nose Day Actually in 2017.

According to the New York Times, director John Maybury made his feelings clearly known after Knightley auditioned for The Jacket. The paper quoted him as saying, 'I don't think you can act, I think you're a lot of hype, and I don't want you on this film.' She recalls the words as being, 'I think you're wrong for this. I don't want you. I don't think you can act.' When asked if she was hurt by the remarks, Knightley replied: 'No, because it was pretty much what everybody was saying, so I actually appreciated the fact that he said it to my face. So I said, if I read for you right now and if you think it's good, you have to give me the part right now. If you think it's s***, you don't have to say anything, you just have to leave.'

After she had finished reading, Maybury got up to leave, but turned at the door to say he'd see her on the set. 'It was a proper Hollywood moment!' Knightley joked later. But the press was dismissive of the thriller in which Jackie Price tries to help amnesiac Gulf War veteran, Jack Starks (Adrien Brody), avoid an awful fate when he is subjected to an experimental treatment by the menacing Dr Becker (Kris Kristofferson).

Despite having a screenplay by Richard Kelly, the director of Donnie Darko (2001), Tony Scott's Domino (2005) also fell foul of the critics. The story was inspired by Domino Harvey, the daugheter of actor Laurence Harvey, who became a bounty hunter in Los Angeles and died of a drug overdose a few months before the film's premiere. Told in flashback after Domino is arrested following a $10 million armoured truck heist, the action features Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken. The reviews were largely negative, with Entertainment Weekly slamming the film as 'trash shot to look like art imitating trash'.

Such retorts no doubt influenced Knightley's decision to take a sabbatical and she focussed solely on period pieces after her return. She did, however, voice Em the evil sister-in-law in Donnie Anderson's all-star animation, Robbie the Reindeer in Close Encounters of the Herd Kind (2007), which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso as part of Robbie the Reindeer Triology: The Whole Herd (2007). Then, following a guest turn as The Fairy in Arran and Corran Brownlee's short, The Continuing and Lamentable Saga of the Suicide Brothers (2009), Knightley co-starred with Colin Firth in then-boyfriend Rupert Friend's short, Steve (which was anthologised in Stars in Shorts, 2012), and appeared as Constance in Stuart Pearson Wright's gallery installation, Maze (both 2010).

On returning to features with a contemporary setting, Knightley joined Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield in Mark Romanek's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, in which Ruth C, Kathy H, and Tommy D discover they are clones who have been created for organ donation. The reviews were mostly positive, although the same was not true for either Massy Tadjedin's directorial debut, Last Night, or William Monahan's noir, London Boulevard (all 2010). The former cast Knightley as Joanna Reed, whose happy marriage to Michael (Sam Worthington) is jeopardised when she bumps into old flame, Alex (Guillaume Canet) and he's vamped on a work trip by new colleague, Laura (Eva Mendes). Based on a book by Ken Gruen, the latter brought a reclusive actress named Charlotte into the orbit of an ex-con (Colin Farrell) and a vicious gangster (Ray Winstone).

Neither film did well, despite the latter's top notch cast. Few had a good word, either, for Lorene Scafaria's Seeking a Friend For the End of the World (2012). Yet this underrated apocalyptic romcom saw Knightley bring such nuance to a 'manic pixie dream girl' role that co-star Steve Carell was prompted to opine, 'I think what sets Keira apart is her ability to convey great strength and great vulnerability at the same time.' Director John Carney wouldn't have agreed, however, after he cast her in Begin Again (2013), as Gretta James, an aspiring singer-songwriter who is discovered by New York label executive, Dan Mulligan (Mark Ruffalo). Carney had considered Adele and Scarlett Johansson for the part and so regretted hiring Knightley that he grumbled in one interview, 'I'll never make a film with supermodels again,' before clarifying, 'I just think with Keira it was like asking her to do something that she could not do.'

Although he apologised and 'Lost Stars' was nominated for Best Song at the Academy Awards, Knightley revealed that she had not had a great rapport with her director, who had not appreciated the effort she had made by taking singing lessons before the shoot. Rather than let the episode knock her off course, however, Knightley moved on to Lynn Shelton's quarter-life crisis comedy, Say When (aka Laggies, 2014), in which directionless twentysomething Megan Burch panics when her boyfriend proposes and hides out in the house of her 16 year-old friend, Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz), and her world-weary single dad, Craig (Sam Rockwell).

The following year, Knightley played Jan, the pregnant wife of New Zealand expedition leader Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) in Everest (2015), Icelander Baltasar Kormákur's account of the disastrous 1996 assault on the world's highest mountain. Another ensemble piece, David Frankel's Collateral Beauty (2016), saw Knightley line up alongside Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, and Helen Mirren in the story of a tormented advertising executive that earned the cast a critical roasting and a collective Razzie nomination.

Knightley and Mirren were reunited in Massy Tadjedin's 'Under Your Feet' segment in Berlin, I Love You, as Jane ignores her mother's warning and offers a refugee a bed for the night. She followed this by cameoing as herself in Michael Winterbottom's Greed, a satire on the fashion industry that starred Steve Coogan as the obscenely wealthy, Sir Richard McCreadie. Her final outing of 2019, Gavin Hood's Official Secrets, was much more warmly received, however, as GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun leaks a memo from the US National Security Agency asking for British assistance in illegally swaying a United Nations vote on the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

After Covid concerns persuaded Knightley to drop out of Clio Barnard's adaptation of Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent (Clare Danes took over), she returned to the theme of the end of days in Camille Griffin's Silent Night (both 2021), in which Nell (Keira Knightley) and Simon (Matthew Goode) invite their closest friends to spend the last Christmas in their picturesque country home. To date, this is her last cinematic excursion, as she has concentrated on small-screen fare and raising her young family.

Way Back When

Deciding to continue with her studies after Bend It Like Beckham, Knightley opted for A level art, history, and English literature when she enrolled at Esher College, a sixth form institution in Elmbridge. However, she left after a year to focus on her acting after she was offered the role of Lara Antipova in Giacomo Campiotti's mini-series, Doctor Zhivago (2002), which had been adapted from Boris Pasternak's novel by Andrew Davies. Nick Hamm had compared Knightley to 'a young version of Julie Christie', which proved more than apt, as she had played the part in David Lean's 1965 feature. Here, Lara cast her spell (in three episodes charting a turbulent period in Russian history) over Yuri Zhivago (Hans Matheson), Victor Komarovsky (Sam Neill), and the hissable Strelnikov (Kris Marshall).

Often seeming more comfortable in period dress, Knightley went back in mythical time to play Guinevere in Antoine Fuqua's Arthur (2004), which co-starred Clive Owen in the title role and Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot. In preparation, Knightley had to learn riding, archery, and boxing, skills she certainly didn't require for her next role. However, things might have been very different had her audition for Joel Schumacher's The Phantom of the Opera (2004) not been such a disaster. Knightley had since called this the most embarrassing moment of her life because 'I knew I couldn't sing it.' Eventually, the part of Christine Daaé went to trained opera singer, Emmy Rossum.

Joe Wright had initially considered Knightley too pretty to play Elizabeth Bennet in his adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice (2005). But he was delighted to discover that she was a tomboy who adored the book and considered Elizabeth to be the perfect role model. 'The beauty of Elizabeth,' she told one reporter, 'is that every woman who ever reads the book seems to recognise herself, with all her faults and imperfections.'

Working with a script by novelist Deborah Moggach, Wright set out to avoid copying the most recent big-screen version, Robert Z. Leonard's Pride and Prejudice (1940), with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as Lizzie and D'Arcy. However, Knightley was more conscious of not copying Jennifer Ehle, who had co-starred with Colin Firth in Simon Langton's celebrated 1995 BBC interpretation. Her success in putting her own stamp on the role was reflected in her Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best Actress, although she was snubbed by BAFTA. At 20 years 311 days, she became the third youngest nominee in the category after Isabelle Adjani (20 years 235 days) for François Truffaut's The Story of Adèle H. (1975) and Keisha Castle-Hughes (13 years 309 days) for Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2003). However, nominations for Jennifer Lawrence (20 years 163 days) in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010) and Quvenzhané Wallis (9 years 135 days) for Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) have pushed her down the pecking order.

When Wright came to adapt Ian McEwan's Atonement (2007), he had no hesitation in asking Knightley to play Cecilia Tallis, whose relationship with housekeeper's son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), perplexes her younger sister, Briony (Saoirse Ronan). Memorably, she wore a green silk georgette dress that was designed by Jacqueline Durran and has since become iconic. Knighley enjoyed studying Celia Johnson in the David Lean/Noël Coward duo of In Which We Serve (1942) and Brief Encounter (1945) in order to capture the style of naturalism that was popular on screen at the time the action was set. She also relished being asked to mentor the younger members of the cast. But she was having such a tough time away from the studio that she had to undergo hypnotherapy in order to walk the red carpet at the BAFTAs, after she had been nominated for Best Actress.

Knightley also received a second Golden Globe nod for her performance and left such a good impression on co-star Benedict Cumberbatch that he gave Mark Kermode a gently corrective arm punch live on air when he called her 'Ikea Knightley' because he considered her acting to be so wooden.

Staying in costume, Knightley played Hélène Joncour in François Girard's Silk (2007), which was adapted from a novel by Alessandro Baricco. As a 19th-century French teacher who spends most of her time gardening, she was rather marginalised from the action, as husband Hervé (Michael Pitt) travels to Japan in search of silkworm eggs and becomes obsessed with an unnamed concubine (Sei Ashina).

She was more to the fore in John Maybury's The Edge of Love (2008), which was written by Sharman Macdonald and cast Knightley as Vera Phillips, a childhood friend of Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys), who is initially viewed with suspicion by his wife, Caitlin (Sienna Miller), when they reunite in wartime London. Cillian Murphy co-starred as William Killick, an army officer who flirts with Vera, who is a singer in a nightclub. Knightley based her character on Marlene Dietrich, but admitted to shaking like a leaf when it came to lip-synching to a playback track.

When the recession caused the cancellation of an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear that would have paired Knightley and Anthony Hopkins, she took the title role in Saul Dibb's The Duchess (2008), which was based on an acclaimed biography of Georgiana Cavendish by Amanda Foreman. Ralph Fiennes co-starred as her tyrannical husband, William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire, while Dominic Cooper played Georgiana's politician lover, Charles Grey.

Despite being nominated for a British Independent Film Award, Knightley took a break from costume dramas, although she did voice Tinker Bell in Nick Willing's mini-series, Neverland, before returning to corsets in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (both 2011), which had been adapted from Christopher Hampton's 2002 stage play, The Talking Cure. Knightley was so concerned about a spanking scene that she informed the Canadian director that she couldn't do the film. When he offered to cut the sequence, she agreed to play Sabina Spielrein, a troubled young woman whose case causes a rift between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his mentor, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Having spent four months reading and discussing Sabina's condition, Knightley left a deep impression on Cronenberg. 'I think she's massively underrated,' he declared in an interview. 'Maybe it is because she's too young, too pretty, too talented, and it gets peoples backs up for some reason. Especially, I must say, in the UK. But you just have to look at her in this movie. I have directed some of the best actresses who've ever lived - and Keira is as good as any of them.'

Joe Wright clearly concurred, as he reunited with Knightley for a third time on Anna Karenina (2012), which was based on the novel by Leo Tolstoy and saw her hold her own against Greta Garbo ( 1935 ), Vivien Leigh ( 1948 ), Claire Bloom ( 1961 ), Nicola Pagett ( 1978 ), Sophie Marceau ( 1997 ), Helen McCrory (2000), and Vittoria Puccini ( 2013 ). She proved just as effective as Gabrielle in Once Upon a Time... (2013), Karl Lagerfeld's short tribute to Coco Chanel, who had been played by Audrey Tautou in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel, Shirley MacLaine and Barbora Bobulová in Christian Duguay's Coco Chanel (both 2008), and Anna Mouglalis in Jan Koen's Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky (2009).

Following another period of intense research, Knightley played cryptanalyst and numismatist Joan Clarke opposite Benedict Cumberbatch's Alan Turing in Morten Tyldum's code-cracking wartime drama, The Imitation Game (2014), which earned her Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Such was the positive reception for Knightley's performance that rumours circulated that Barbra Streisand had chosen her to headline a biopic about Catherine the Great of Russia. However, the project never came to fruition.

Instead, Wash Westmoreland cast her as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Colette, which co-starred Dominic West as Henry Gauthier-Villars, the husband who shamelessly published his wife's Claudine novels under his own nom de plume, Willy. When she has an affair with Georgie Raoul-Duval (Eleanor Tomlinson), he follows suit and Colette decides to take a stand. While the reviews were good, they was less enthusiastic for Disney's The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (both 2018), which saw Knightley play the Sugar Plum Fairy. However, the fact that Lasse Hallström had been forced to accept Joe Johnston as co-director after he had supervised a month's-worth of reshoots meant that it reached cinemas with negative buzz. Knightley also managed to upset the studio when she revealed while promoting the film that she didn't allow her daughter to watch classic animations like Cinderella (1950) and The Little Mermaid (1989) because she disapproved of the messages they sent out to young girls.

As the fuss died down, Knightley signed on to play Rachael Morgan in The Aftermath (2019), James Kent's adaptation of a Rhidian Brook novel, in which a mother who lost a son in the Blitz travels to Hamburg to stay in the home of German architect Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), while her soldier husband (Jason Clarke) supervises the rebuilding of the bombed city. She would return to this period when she voiced Charlotte Salomon in Éric Warin and Tahir Rana's animated feature, Charlotte (2021), which chronicles the tragic life of a Jewish artist in the 1930s.

The fashions were among the most striking aspects of Philippa Lowthorpe's Misbehaviour (2020), which shows how mature student Sally Alexander joined a group of feminist activists to sabotage the 1970 Miss World contest in London. With Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Loreece Harrison showing how the beauty pageant impacted upon the lives of contestants Jennifer Hosten (Miss Grenada) and Pearl Jansen (Miss Africa South), this is an intriguing treatise on the politics and morality of equal rights campaigning.

Another working mother is to the fore in Matt Ruskin's Boston Strangler (2023), a teleplay set in the 1960s that centres on journalist Loretta McLaughlin (Knightley), as she reports on the 1960s reign of terror that saw 13 women murdered and left the police baffled. Cinema Paradiso users can learn more about these events from such reconsructions as Richard Fleischer's The Boston Strangler (1968) and Michael Feifer's The Boston Strangler (2008), as well as the 2000 documentaries, Infamous Serial Killers of Our Time: The Boston Strangler and Notorious Killers: The Boston Strangler.

Here and There

Away from the screen, Knightley has appeared in a number of plays. Based on an idea hatched by her 13 year-old daughter after watching Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Sharman Macdonald wrote After Juliet (2000) to explore what happened to the Capulets and Montagues after the deaths of Juliet and Romeo. The play was entered in the Connections competition run by the National Theatre, with a young Keira in the cast.

She made her West End debut as Jennifer, alongside Damian Lewis and Tara Fitzgerald, in Martin Crimp's 2009 version of Molière's comedy, The Misanthrope. Her performance earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Olivier Awards, as well as an Evening Standard Award. Two years later, she played Karen Wright, the schoolteacher accused of lesbianism in a revival of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour. But she had to wait until 2015 to make it to Broadway, when she took the title role in Helen Edmundson's Studio 54 adaptation of Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin. Uncertain she could plum the necessary depths of evil, she turned down the role twice. Yet, despite the encouraging notices, Knightley has not returned to the stage since.

Prepared to use her celebrity for good, she has campaigned for Oxfam and Amnesty International and has appeared in videos highlighting the abuse of women (Cut, 2009) and the global refugee crisis (What They Took With Them, 2016). She also guested in the Comic Relief video, '2020 The Movie' (2021). But family life has become a priority since she and Klaxons keyboard player, James Righton, whom she married in the quiet village of Mazan in Provence on 4 May 2013. She has said of her husband: 'He's the sort of person who will be the brightest light in any room whereas I'm the one who sits in the corner. And he's much nicer than me.'

They have two daughters, Edie and Delilah. Following the birth of her first, Knightley wrote an unflinching essay entitled, 'The Weaker Sex', which was published in the collection, Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies. Subsequently, she has written a children's book, I Love You Just the Same (2024), which upset some struggling authors who felt that celebrities had an unfair advantage when it came to accessing editors.

Back on the day job, Knightley joined the Season 7 cast of Totally Spies! (2001-) to voice Geraldine Husk. She also appeared alongside Kit Harington, Toby Jones, and Emeli Sandé in the second series of My Grandparents' War (2022), in which she learned about her grandfather's time at sea and her grandmother's secret role in D-Day. The following year, she started narrating Eric Vs Bat's The Collector (2023-) and has racked up 60 episodes to date.

More significantly, Knightley joined the cast of Black Doves (2024) to play Helen, the wife of a Conservative politician (Andrew Buchan) who is part of a clandestine group led by the vengeful Reed (Sarah Lancashire). Having received Golden Globe and Critics' Choice Television Award recognition for her work, she told the press, 'If you asked me at 16 what I wanted to play, this would have been right up there. So it felt like a lovely little gift to my teenage self.'

The chances of the series coming to disc are remote, as that's not how Netflix operates - which means Simon Stone's upcoming thriller, The Woman in Cabin 10, in which Knightley is due to play a travel writer on a superyacht, may also remain out of reach. She has said that she'd like to be a hermit for a while. But she can do whatever she likes these days, although we shouldn't expect her to crop up in anything too murky. As she told Esquire: 'I don't have a plan going forward. I can only do what I'm interested in at that particular moment. Over the last few years, I've been offered some amazing things, but they were so dark. And if you'd asked me to do them ten years ago, I would have been like, "yeah great," and recently, I've gone, "I can't face that."'