Vintage postcard. Keira Knightley in King Arthur (Antoine Fuqua, 2004). Knightley's first name is misspelled here as Kiara.
Chinese postcard by Oriental City Publishing Group Limited.
Vintage postcard by Idoles. Photo: Walt Disney Pictures. Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006).
A tomboy football player struggling against social norms
Keira Christina Righton-Knightley OBE was born in 1985 in London to stage actor Will Knightley and acclaimed playwright Sharman Macdonald. Knightley has an older brother, Caleb. Keira attended Teddington School.
At age six, she obtained an agent and initially acted in commercials and television films. She focused on art, history, and English literature while studying at Esher College, but left after a year to pursue an acting career.
On TV, Keira played Natasha Jordan, a young girl whose mother (Sophie Ward) is involved in an extramarital affair, in the romantic drama A Village Affair (Moira Armstrong, 1995). She showed unusually artistic tastes in her early roles, playing the young Gabrielle Anwar in Innocent Lies (Patrick DeWolf, 1995) and the youthful Emily Mortimer in the Rosamund Pilcher TV adaptation Coming Home (Giles Foster, 1998).
In the cinema, she appeared as Sabé, Queen Padmé Amidala's (Natalie Portman) handmaiden and decoy, in the Science-Fiction blockbuster Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999). Her resemblance to Portman at the time was such that her appearance during the promotion of the film was kept a secret. Outwardly, it was maintained that Portman played both Amidala and Sabé.
Her first major role, she had in the Walt Disney Productions TV film Princess of Thieves (Peter Hewitt, 2001). Knightley played the daughter of Robin Hood. Concurrently, she appeared in The Hole (Nick Hamm, 2001), a thriller that received a direct-to-video release in the US.
Despite having appeared in over a dozen film and television roles, Knightley struggled to get a breakthrough until portraying a tomboy soccer player in the British sports film Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2001), co-starring Parminder Nagra and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Knightley portrayed Jules, a tomboy football player struggling against social norms who convinces her friend to pursue the sport. The film was a surprise critical and commercial success with a gross of $76.6 million at the box office.
As Lara Antipova in the TV miniseries Doctor Zhivago (Giacomo Campiotti, 2002), Knightley gracefully slipped into a role that was previously made famous by Julie Christie, and the timeless romantic drama proved a hit with British television viewers.
Knightley achieved global stardom at age 18 when she portrayed the role of Elizabeth Swann opposite Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp in the fantastic Swashbuckler Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003).
"Her debut Hollywood film, writes Alexander Larman at Screenonline, "allowed her to look fetching while battling undead pirates, but she remained subsidiary to Johnny Depp's grandstanding hamming - though not enough to prevent her being cast in the two sequels." The film opened at number one on the box office, and became one of the highest-grossing releases of the year, with worldwide revenues of $654 million.
In the same year, she played a cameo in the Christmas romantic comedy Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) alongside some of the best-known British film actors of the time including Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Rowan Atkinson, and Colin Firth. It became another box-office success, grossing $246 million worldwide on a budget of $40–45 million. Frequently shown during the Christmas season, the film has proved more popular with audiences than critics, and it has been discussed as being arguably a modern-day Christmas staple.
French postcard by Sonis, no. C. 1705. Photo: Disney. Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006).
British postcard by Arcards, no. 0842. Photo: Walt Disney Pictures. Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006).
Vintage postcard. Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Gore Verbinski, 2007).
Belgian postcard by Nieuwsblad.be. Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Gore Verbinski, 2007).
Elizabeth Bennet and Elizabeth Swann
Keira Knightley gave a feisty performance as Guinevere in King Arthur (Antoine Fuqua, 2004) opposite Clive Owen and Ioan Gruffudd. It reinforced her credentials as a contemporary action heroine. Then she portrayed Elizabeth Bennet in an adaption of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005), which earned Knightley her first Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. At age 20, she became the second-youngest Best Actress nominee.
In 2006, she reprised her role as Elizabeth Swann in the second and third productions of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Gore Verbinski, 2007).
Knightley then starred in a series of further period pieces, portraying a complex love interest in Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) with James McAvoy, tastemaker Georgiana Cavendish in The Duchess (Saul Dibb, 2008), and the titular socialite in Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012).
She then forayed into contemporary dramas, appearing as an aspiring musician in Begin Again (John Carney, 2013) and a medical student in the spy thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Kenneth Branagh, 2014), starring Chris Pine. Knightley returned to historical films by playing Joan Clarke, a woman who helped crack German codes during WWII, in The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014), earning her a second round of Academy Award and BAFTA nominations, and by starring as the eponymous belle époque writer in Colette (Wash Westmoreland, 2018) to critical acclaim.
Knightley reprised the role of Elizabeth Swann with a cameo appearance in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg, 2017) after test audiences repeatedly inquired about her character. On stage, she has appeared in two West End productions: Molière's comedy 'The Misanthrope' in 2009, which earned her an Olivier Award nomination, and 'The Children's Hour' by Lillian Hellman in 2011. She also starred as the eponymous heroine in the 2015 Broadway production of Émile Zola's 'Thérèse Raquin.
Keira Knightley is known for her outspoken stance on social issues and has worked extensively with Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Comic Relief. Knightley was in a relationship with her Pride and Prejudice counterpart Rupert Friend for five years. She married musician James Righton in 2013; they have two children.
Knightley's first role of the new decade was feminist activist Sally Alexander in Misbehaviour (Philippa Lowthorpe, 2020), a British comedy-drama about the crowning of the first black contestant at the 1970 Miss World competition. Knightley is set to star in the upcoming holiday comedy Silent Night, written and directed by Camille Griffin.
Vintage postcard by Idoles. With Orlando Bloom.
French postcard by Dream'up. Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Gore Verbinski, 2007).
Vintage postcard. Keira Knightley in The Duchess (Saul Dibb, 2008).
Sources: Alexander Larman (BFI Screenonline), Jason Buchanan (AllMovie), Wikipedia (English and Dutch), and IMDb.
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