Born lippy

In one seamless motion Keira Knightley sweeps into the hotel room and alights imperially onto her chair. Shoulders back; chin forward, her impressively erect carriage makes you wonder if she’s balancing an invisible book on her head.

Hurriedly, she scans the half-dozen journalists huddled around the table. Her people – a manager and an unspecified assistant – dutifully take their places behind her. Their presence, it soon transpires, is hardly necessary.
“Hello,” she announces in the same tone a newly arrived governess might use to politely assert her authority. She smooths down her sheer white Bora Aksu frock and adjusts the differently coloured buttons on her high-end casual knit. All introductions and opening inquiries are swiftly batted outfield with a gorgeous, defensive smile.
She sighs. Yes, this is the end of Pirates Of The Caribbean so far as she’s concerned. No, she’s heard nothing officially and can’t imagine doing another one.
“Trilogies do come in threes, I’m afraid,” she adds helpfully.
One Spanish reporter – clearly a fan – seems unwilling to accept the possibility of the franchise continuing without her.
“But, but, you know, the sets and the costumes and the whole pirate world,” he stammers.
“If they are doing a fourth one I suspect they’ll have new sets and costumes, don’t you?” comes the prompt retort.
We laugh nervously. A German chap wonders if this isn’t precisely the sort of abrasive honesty that keeps getting her into trouble.
“Honesty has never got me into a bad situation,” she beams angelically. “I think your profession has twisted my honesty and got me into bother. What you do is built on lies. I have to answer for things that have absolutely nothing to do with me. If there isn’t a story then you still have to fill up the pages of your daily or weekly publication. It’s rather boring in fact.”
Uh-oh. If I didn’t work for a fortnightly periodical I might be inclined to take this personally. Instead I warm to the cut of her jib. She may be a prickly, challenging interviewee, but isn’t that the best thing in the world for a girl her age to be?
Besides, you can’t help but cheer a little when you watch her respond to the really inane inquiries. “Who do you like better – Orlando or Johnny?” asks one particularly lazy-minded hack. Still smiling at her interrogator, she makes a few perfunctory compliments about her Pirates co-stars before she hits back with a sucker punch – “Is it normal for us to say whom we prefer? I don’t think that’s normal.”
She’s always been the sort to put her foot down. Born into an artistic dynasty – her dad is actor Will Knightley, her mum is writer Sharman MacDonald – young Keira would ask for an agent at the age of three and embark on a television career at seven. Her first sniff at world domination came with Star Wars Episode 1; The Phantom Menace in which she played Sabé, the decoy for Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala. By the time she finished her A-levels, Keira had played Lara in a TV adaptation of Dr. Zhivago and scored a $32 million sleeper hit with Bend It Like Beckham.
“It’s a huge lack of imagination on my part,” she says. “But I never thought of anything else I wanted to do. I found it very difficult to pick subjects for college. Had I gone to university then frankly I would have been wasting everybody’s time.”
I ask her if she feels she has missed out on a normal, dull, character-building adolescence.
“I sometimes think it would have been better if I had started later,” she nods. “But then I would never have had the success that I’ve had. People are always looking for young people to cast in movies and plays. So by the time I was 16 I had years of experience which put me ahead of the pack. If I had started now it would have been a hell of a lot more difficult.”
She was still 17 when she caught the eye of megabucks producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who snapped her up for Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl. Four years and a sequel later (Dead Man’s Chest), the franchise has taken $1.6 billion at the box-office and made Knightley a global star. The release of Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End this month can only add to the spoils.
“I don’t think any of us imagined it would be so successful,” says Keira. “It’s nice that they’re well-loved. I hear people were actually queuing to see the trailer which is quite extraordinary. But it’s been years! I was 17 when I started and I’m 22 now. That’s a long time to spend pirating.”
She is equally ambivalent about the fame that pirating has bestowed on her.
“I have lost the right to walk down a street without a photographer following me,” she announces in her haughtiest voice. “Anonymity is a very beautiful thing. We were in rural Ethiopia recently dancing around a fire when someone recognised me. Sometimes I think I’d love to take a walk in the park. Without any journalists, thank you.”

My, she’s a firecracker of a thing, but no more so than necessary. Sadly, at the tender age of 22, Ms. Knightley has generated more negative commentary than global warming and syphilis combined.
Many trees have been felled to provide us with pictures of Keira with spots or, more frequently, Keira Looking Thin.
This is a tricky area. Recently, the mother of 19-year-old Sophie Mazurek, who died of anorexia, cited an image of Keira wearing a bikini as the trigger to her daughter’s illness. Indeed, the actress is currently involved in a legal action against the Daily Mail for suggesting she has lost too much weight and may be anorexic.
In the flesh and up close, Ms. Knightley is certainly gamine, though not unusually so for women in her profession.
Still, those rumours don’t seem to be going anywhere. A brief scan of pro-ana and pro-mia sites suggests that Knightley and Victoria Beckham are pre-eminent among the so-called ‘thinspirations’ (or ‘thinspos’) for teenage girls seeking to starve themselves. (“Keira Knightley has always been my perfect thinspiration,” writes Maladika in Germany, “…she’s a great thinspo for most pro-anas.”)
Though Knightley’s grandmother and great-grandmother were anorexic, she has always insisted that she is simply ‘naturally skinny’.
“I tend to think it’s all made-up nonsense,” she tells me. “I get lumped in with these size zero people. We don’t even have size zero in Britain. Size four is our smallest. I haven’t even encountered size zero. But it isn’t nice when people write that you have a mental disease.”
You can tell it hurts. But unhappily for Keira, she’s beautiful, successful, naturally svelte, ridiculously young and driven. These kinds of attributes will always land you in trouble. What else can this pretty porcelain creature have done to incur the capitalised wrath of IMDb user jellie_kellie? “SHE’S SO UGLY! YOU KNOW SHE IS,” trumpets the confused complainant. The twits over on the Yahoo boards are inclined to agree. “I think Keira is just famous, because she wags her head and grimaces like a retard every time she’s talking, and gives guys an outlet for their repressed homosexual yearnings,” offers one grammatically challenged malcontent.
Legitimate outlets are equally capable of anti-Keira rhetoric and speculation. Early romantic dalliances with Northern Irish supermodel Jamie Dornan (Marie Antoinette) and actor Del Synnott were closely and cruelly analysed by the tabloids. When Mr. Synnott reputedly attempted suicide after the relationship ended, a flurry of accusatory headlines soon followed. She is currently seeing her Pride And Prejudice co-star Rupert Friend. Or so we suppose. There’s little point in asking her for gory details.
“I don’t talk about my boyfriend,” she grins slyly. “I’m not even sure who you mean.”
Fair enough. Had I not perused a folder of press clippings that made me wrongly expect History’s Greatest Monster to come through the door, I might be inclined to think Ms. Knightley paranoid. But when you hear her perfectly worded answers delivered in beautifully practised diction, you can frequently feel the shivering little girl behind the schoolmarm.
“I sometimes think I’m not pristine enough for all this,” she says. “My brother came to visit me in LA and we went out to a club with his girlfriend. We were looking through the crowd and all the women seemed to have purchased their legs in the same place, a place where legs go way above my head. My brother said it’s not an attractive look. It’s something that takes hours in front of a mirror. I like a nice clean look myself. But unfortunately I’ve been voted one of the scruffiest people in the world.”
Is all this criticism coming from other women I wonder? Is it just a grown-up version of playground jealously?
“Well, it doesn’t come from men’s magazines,” she says. “I don’t mind that sector so much. Mostly, they stick to saying things like she’s fit. That’s alright. If that’s all they’re saying I’m inclined to think, well thank you very much. The women’s magazines are much worse. I always feel exactly like that – like I’m back in the playground. I think it’s totally unnecessary. I try not to read them. So I only hear about the worst of the worst. I’ve thought about taking action but it could only hurt my career. So I think I’ll let that lot all stay in their playground and I’ll try to get out of it.”
The German gentleman seated nearby interrupts with a remark intended to butter her up – “I think this leggy busty blonde Hollywood look you were describing is out of fashion, no?”
Everyone is the room ducks for cover. Ha. She’s doing her big smile again.
“So you think tits are out of fashion?” she trills. “I don’t think that’s true, do you?”
Wow. If I were in a terrible Rat Pack film, I’d probably say something like ‘the kitten’s got claws’. But we should have known from her CV that this West Ham supporting tomboy could give a bloody nose if required.
“It’s true that I personally like women who have a bit of bite to them,” she says. “I love the Joan Of Arcs of the world. I’ve done Silk for later this year and it’s my first ultra-feminine role. It’s a woman who is mainly interested in home and marriage. I was interested because I was totally obsessed with the book (by Alessandro Baricco) and because my own tendencies are very much of the opposite inclination. I’m usually interested in playing strong women. My favourite films growing up were La Reine Margot and anything with Katharine Hepburn or Emma Thompson. I mean, this morning I was asked – very many times – whether my main ambition was to be married with children. I found it quite offensive. Have we not moved beyond this yet? Family and children are a beautiful thing, I’m sure, but it’s extraordinary that people keep telling me that I really want something else other than my career. The men are never told that.”
Domesticity is unlikely to come between Ms. Knightley and her glittering career any time soon. In the coming months, she will grace our screens in Pirates, Silk and an adaptation of Ian Mc Ewan’s Atonement. (“I’m not the dainty one,” she laughs, “I’m Cecilia, the one with all the edges.”) She’s currently shooting The Best Time Of Our Lives, a Dylan Thomas biopic starring Cillian Murphy, Sienna Miller and Matthew Rhys, from a script by her mummy.
“I just can’t find anything negative about the script,” says Keira. “I’m so fantastically proud of her.”
She clearly loves her work, but has recently talked of quitting altogether. Surely her success as an actress cancels out all the rubbish that goes with it?
“Fuck no,” she cries. “Success doesn’t help. It doesn’t make you more confident. It just makes you think ‘Oh, these are the three high points in my career.’ You go into every film hoping it will be great but knowing that it probably won’t entirely work. I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved with Bend It Like Beckham, which everyone thought would fail, and Pride And Prejudice, which worked even though everyone said ‘How dare she? She can’t even act.’ But there are very few films that I see and think that’s a perfect piece of film. And that’s okay. Films with mistakes are often a hell of a lot more interesting. And you have to be willing to accept failure. Luckily, we actors are very selfish people. I go into every film for my own benefit.”
She puts on her haughty voice again.
“I know. I’m very selfish. I don’t really care if people like it or not.”
Good for her.
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End is released May 24.