Keira Knightley is a woman confident in the life she lives
Keira Knightley makes no apologies for who she is – nor should she. The formidable actress may only be 29, but her movie career has already spanned two decades. She was just nine when she first appeared on screen in 1994, in A Village Affair. Her film repertoire is a varied and eclectic one: from a doppelganger diversion in Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace and soccer-playing star in Bend it Like Beckham to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, a role for which she received an Academy Award nomination.
Other films include Atonement, Pirates of the Caribbean, Love Actually and Anna Karenina. More recently she has featured in Jack Ryan and Begin Again, which is due for release in South Africa later this month.Despite the diversity of roles, one thing has remained clear and consistent: Knightley favours the strong, independent female roles. Perhaps there is a little of her that she recognizes in each role she chooses to play. After all, this English rose, born of an actor father and playwright mother, first requested her own agent at the age of three. Her parents, Will Knightley and Sharman MacDonald, finally acquiesced when she was six.
However, school didn’t come easily for her, as perhaps, ironically, this avid book-reader was diagnosed as dyslexic. She told the UK Daily Mail that she tried everything, as a child, to overcome the condition.
“I had tutors for years and I used coloured plastic sheets to put over the text, which helps some people but didn’t really help me.”For her, it came down to simple hard work. “A lot of it is down to perseverance and, hopefully, you will have parents who will work hard with you, because that’s what mine did. I still have days when reading just won’t work, but most days it will.”She adds that it’s something that doesn’t ever go away. “Sight reading is a problem – I can read text on a page, but if I have to read it aloud, it might be a problem. That doesn’t come easily.”
However, Knightley embraces the challenges that come her way – her career choice has meant that reading and script learning are a vital component of her work. One way her mother helped her to find coping mechanisms was by making her recite Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility aloud. In an interview for Begin Again, she explained that in order to work while on set, she can’t read anything or really do anything when she is on pause between scenes. “Some people work in different ways – some people can be incredibly sociable, but I can’t be sociable and then be that other person.I’ve got to be sort of concentrated. So I’m literally on pause.”It’s this quietness of mind and soul that sometimes creates an impression of being aloof. As she shared in an interview with Annabel Brog in Elle UK’s July issue: “I know I can be very… I have an on/off switch and, when I’m doing publicity, I’m absolutely okay, but when I’m not working and people come up to me, I’ve not got the head on to handle that. I don’t give off a nice energy and that makes me nervous.”
In a previous interview with Michelle Manelis and Australian Vogue, she said something she only realised when Pirates of the Caribbean came out was that she didn’t enjoy a huge amount of public recognition. “I didn’t react to it well, but I think life is about finding out who you are and what you like. So I started doing independent movies and art-house films instead. I made a conscious decision to live my life the best way I could, and that meant to publicise myself as little as possible.”She adds: “It’s an interesting thing when you discover something about yourself. To go: ‘Wow, I’m not the person I thought I was. I’m in the middle of something and I can’t actually deal with it.’ So, for the moment, keeping a low profile is the best way for me.”
Knightley realises that celebrity comes with the territory, but doesn’t mean that she chooses to live in the limelight. As she told Brog: “I think it’s dreams and fantasies. People want you to be a specific kind of person and if, in the flesh, you’re not, that can be tremendously disappointing. They can get quite angry, aggressive, be like ‘why are you here?’ when I’m sitting in a park or café. The first time, you’re like ‘Whoah, what was that?’, but then it makes sense; you’re meant to be living on cloud celebrity – of course, that doesn’t exist – and it can be quite annoying for people that you’re trespassing in their world. I don’t like being places where people will notice that I’m an actress and they might find that either exciting or weird.”
This is one of the reasons why she chooses the roles she does– characters who are aloof or disdainful. “If you play likeable parts, people think they can come up to you on the street, and I don’t like people coming up to me on the street.” Having said that, Gretta in Begin Again is a likable and completely relatable character. The movie is described as “a soul-stirring comedy about what happens when lost souls meet and make beautiful music together”.
Knightley’s Gretta and her long-time boyfriend, Dave (played by Adam Levine), are college sweethearts and songwriting partners who decamp for New York when Davelands a major record label. Of course, as these things do, Dave not only dumps her musically, but personally as well, as he is lured into stardom. Gretta finds music-writing solace in Dan (played by Mark Ruffalo), a disgraced record-label executive who stumbles upon her performing on an East Village stage and is captivated by her raw talent. Speaking about her role, Knightley said: “I liked the script. I was looking for something positive. I had been doing a lot of films for the previous five-year period that were all very dark. I was very much looking for something with a happy ending and something that would have hope in it.”She adds that she is not the biggest fan of romantic comedies. “I find that they can go very, very cheesy, and I don’t like that. I was reading a lot of stuff and I was feeling that it was going too far into that thing that I didn’t like. With this one, I thought that it was acerbic enough and had sort of dark elements, and didn’t go too cheesy for me.”
The idea that she had to sing didn’t really enter her mind until they got on set. Knightley shares how, in the script, it was pages of dialogue and then would say, “and then she sings a song”, then pages of dialogue. She didn’t think that carefully about the need for her to sing (which she can do very well, by the way. This could have to do with her dyslexia, but Knightley admits that she likes to plan her character and study the script. This particular role pushed her completely out of her comfort zone, as not only did director John Carney throw most of the script tout days before they were due to start shooting, but improvisation was the order of the day.
“It was throwing everything that I knew and liked out the window and totally trying something completely different. So I found it all really frightening – I mean, as much as it was fun and everyone was really lovely, and all the rest of it, it was actually totally the opposite of the way I like, or thought that I liked, to work, which was again the point of doing it as well.”She adds: “I’d learnt the whole script, with the accent on what was in the script, and I wasn’t confident enough to be able to improvise in the accent, so I dumped the whole of the plan for the character four days before we started, and decided to make her completely different than I had originally planned to. So that was scary!”
Her singing wasn’t based on anybody in particular; she didn’t use any influences. “Partly because the top lines and the lyrics weren’t actually written until two or three days before we went into the studio, so I couldn’t sit with it, or figure out what it was.”
The process was organic: they got into the studio, and then found something that was based on her character, Gretta. “She’s not a performer, she’s not someone who liked performing, she’s someone who likes singing for herself, and is actually quite shy.”Once they found Knightley’s singing range, they wrote the songs to fit the range. She found the entire process utterly frightening and challenging – and intensely rewarding. “We were given the songs the night before, so again, for somebody who likes a lot of preparation, I was like ‘I have no idea what I’m doing!’ So we did many, many takes of many different styles until we found something that everybody just went ‘Oh! That was it’, and it felt right for me as well. I heard all of this stuff that you’re supposed to be drunk and have a great time at the studio – all I got was a peppermint tea! I was like ‘This wasn’t the idea! What the hell!’”Perhaps this is ironic for someone who is married to a musician.
However, Knightley shares that she has always been more interested in reading and books than music. “I’m so not musical, in any way. Part of the reason is that I’m not somebody who is naturally drawn to music. I don’t really listen to it, I don’t really remember it, and part of the reason I wanted to do this film was to try and get into that mindset of it. Because obviously, I’m married to a musician, all of my friends are obsessed with music, I have a lot of musician friends, my brother was in bands and is a sound-recordist, and my sister-in-law is a virtuoso violinist and works in music technology. I’m surrounded by it! And it’s not a place I naturally go to.”Knightley admits that she is drawn to strong female characters. “It’s very difficult to find female leads where it isn’t predominantly a romantic piece.As much as this can be called a romantic comedy, and as much as she is getting over the fact that she was getting over her boyfriend, for me, I felt her story was about her finding her own feet and standing up on her own, and doing something for herself.”
As she shared with Brog, her dream role would be a cast of all women: “because that is an interesting dynamic already” The plot? Try to have a baby when you can’t. “I’ve seen friends who’ve been through this; it seems like one of the most dramatic things that can happen to half of the population– and actually, the other half as well, because, my god, the unbelievable toll it takes on male partners. And there are no good films about it.”Knightley adds that there is an under-representation of women in general. “There is an under-representation of our stories, just as there is an under-representation of us in politics, in business and everywhere. That’s what feminism is (to me) right now, the recognition that we are still not equal.”While the roles she chooses are diverse, she adds that there are very defined links between them. Chapters, she calls them chapters of the characters that define her work life.
She is very clear that the role is her work, not who she is. As she says, as a celebrity, she needs to have a public image– it doesn’t need to correspond with the real Keira. “I have a make-up person, someone who does my hair and I get dressed up. What I am away from that is absolutely, completely, 100%different. Not personality wise, obviously, but I think you have to have something that is for yourself and something other than a public image”.