In one of Love Actually’s most memorable scenes, Keira Knightley’s character Juliet gazes at a video from her wedding. Her lovely face has been captured in an unsettling close-up by her new husband’s best friend, the equally unsettling Mark, played by Andrew Lincoln. “I look quite pretty,” she trills, a manic pixie posh girl slowly being engulfed by a huge baker boy cap. That line, delivered when Knightley was just 18, seemed to set the tenor for how she would be perceived by her viewing public thereafter. Beautiful, but very aware of it. A touch self-satisfied. Poised to a frankly annoying extent.
More than 20 years on, Knightley is playing another photogenic wife in another Christmas-set ensemble piece. In the Netflix series Black Doves, the now 39-year-old plays Helen, who is married to (and cheating on) a high-ranking politician. So far, so Richard Curtis. Until we learn that Helen is a spy in deep cover and part of an international espionage ring – and her double life is about to catch up with her in a big way.
Underneath her elegant appearance – all fancy tonal knitwear and the sort of tousled updos that are designed to look effortless but require hours of wrangling in front of the mirror – she is furious, funny and fascinating, She’s also alarmingly good at repurposing her fancy kitchen implements to ward off assassins. Black Doves is just the latest in a string of very different projects inviting us to reconsider the image of Knightley that we’ve been carrying around in our heads since the early Noughties – and to look back at the criticism and vitriol that was directed at the young actor as a result.
So how did Knightley become one of our most unfairly divisive stars? Despite the period drama-ready RP accent, she is not one of British acting’s minor aristocrats. Instead, she was born into a theatrical family: her father Will and mother Sharman Macdonald worked as jobbing actors, and the latter wrote plays. In fact, Knightley has said she owes her existence to “a bet”. Macdonald wanted a second child, but her husband told her that “the only way they could afford to have one was if she sold a play” (her script for When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout was picked up by the Bush Theatre in 1984, the year before Knightley was born).
Growing up hearing her parents taking phone calls from their respective agents, a precocious Knightley decided that she’d quite like one of those, too. She signed with one at the age of six and appeared in adverts, children’s TV and the obligatory episode of The Bill. Her first big break came in 1999, when she appeared in Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace as Sabé, a lady in waiting and decoy for Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala (she was cast for her striking resemblance to Portman).
A few years later, she starred as Jules, best friend and teammate to Parminder Nagra’s football-mad Jess in Gurinder Chadha’s culture-clash comedy Bend It Like Beckham. And then came what she would later refer to as a “very tricky five-year window” that made Knightley’s career and broke her in the process. In 2003, she appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, donning a corset to play Elizabeth Swann, who starts out as an 18th-century damsel in distress before learning to fend for herself in distinctly 21st-century fashion.
Back then, a pirate movie inspired by a Disney theme park attraction didn’t necessarily seem like a surefire success: Knightley’s friends joked “Well, that’s your career over then” when she was cast, she later told the Telegraph. But the film, which also starred Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp, was a huge hit. It made 18-year-old Knightley famous around the world – and made her the target of media obsession and vitriol in the process.
Young women seemed to be encouraged to aspire to look like her and to despise her at the same time
Critiquing her performance and her persona became a sport: she was too pouty, too posh, too wooden, too thin, a rubbish actor and a terrible role model. No wonder that the film and its sequels occupy “a very confused place” in Knightley’s head. “It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” she told The Times last month, adding: “They were the most successful films I’ll ever be a part of, and they were the reason that I was taken down publicly.” Love Actually was released a few months after the first Pirates, and only provided more fodder. “There was a very long time when [interviewers] were all: well, you’re a s*** actor and you’re anorexic and people hate you’, which, for a teenager or somebody in their early twenties, is a very strange thing,” Knightley told Elle UK.
These attitudes weren’t just confined to newsprint either. Mentioning Knightley’s name in conversation in the early Noughties tended to provoke eye-rolls and discussion of how annoying she seemed, all for the sins of playing underwritten characters and looking glamorous on red carpets. She occupied an impossible, contradictory position: she seemed to embody the prevailing beauty standard of the era, but at the same time, we couldn’t stop talking about what was perceived to be wrong about that beauty. Young women seemed to be encouraged to aspire to look like her and to despise her at the same time. One Guardian article even went so far as to frame Knightley-baiting as a twisted form of female bonding: “If you want to befriend a woman, ask her the question, ‘What do you think of Keira Knightley?’”
Yet Knightley’s career went from strength to strength. She was cast as Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and earned an Oscar nomination for the role (despite some murmurings about whether her looks precluded her from playing Jane Austen’s witty heroine: even her director admitted he’d initially written her off as “just too pretty”). Her next collaboration with Wright, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, brought her a Bafta nomination. But her success only made her more of a target: Wright, who saw her ascent first hand, has said that he “wouldn’t wish the level of press harassment she got on [his] own worst enemy”.
She was hounded by paparazzi who hoped to catch her unravelling: as she would later put it in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “pictures of women falling apart” could command “big money” at the time. “If you weren’t breaking down in front of them, then it was worth their while to make you break down in front of them,” she said. “So suddenly there was a level of violence, it felt, in the air. That is not a thing that anybody would react to well.” Her weight became the subject of invasive questioning. In 2007, she won a libel claim against the Daily Mail after the paper alleged that she had an eating disorder (she donated her damages, and the same sum again, to the charity Beat). Those insinuations, she later explained, were particularly hurtful because she had friends and family members who had experienced anorexia. And the criticism “made [her] think ‘maybe my body is somehow not right. Or my face is not right.’”
Period pieces make sense to her because they so often portray women jostling against very circumscribed expectations of femininity
At the age of 22, Knightley had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (something she only made public in 2018). When she appeared at the Baftas in 2008, it was the first time she’d left her house in three months; she’d undergone hypnotherapy to prevent her having a panic attack on the red carpet. She took a year off and, once her Pirates obligations were all ticked off, started to take on projects that stretched our notion of a “Keira Knightley role”.
She tried her hand at heartbreaking dystopian sci-fi in an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, starred in apocalyptic comedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World opposite Steve Carell and sang and played the guitar in Begin Again. Her director in that film, John Carney, made some scathing comments about how that film taught him to “never make a film with supermodels again” – which were quickly shouted down on social media, with many of Knightley’s past collaborators supporting her. (If Carney – who later apologised – shared those remarks 10 years before, you can imagine them being received with glee rather than outrage.)
And while, yes, she kept appearing in costume dramas, there was often something subversive about those roles, like her twitchy turn as a so-called “hysteric” in David Cronenberg’s weird psycho-period drama A Dangerous Method. Or her role as a brilliant Bletchley Park codebreaker in The Imitation Game. Or her energetic turn as the subversive French writer in Colette. Period pieces make sense to her because they so often portray women jostling against very circumscribed expectations of femininity, she’s said: “It’s such an overt cage you put the woman in. That’s always something I’ve really identified with.” And, as she bluntly put it in 2018, while historical pieces have offered her “very inspiring characters”, contemporary films often feature sexual violence towards women. “I don’t really do films set in the modern day because the female characters nearly always get raped,” she told Variety.
Indeed, as she’s got older, she’s become more outspoken in interviews, about the issues in her industry and about her personal experiences. She’s movingly discussed the impact of her trial-by-media as a young woman (“It’s obviously part of my psyche, given how young I was when it happened,” she told The Times, “I’ve been made around it”) and how this has shaped her hopes for the two young daughters she shares with her musician husband James Righton. In a 2018 essay, she shared a graphic account of giving birth to her eldest child, Edie, and railed against the sexist pressure for women to look immaculate as new mothers. And she’s also a vocal advocate for equal parenting, as well as being one of few Hollywood stars to talk candidly about how their childcare arrangements impact their career: in 2020, she stepped back from the Apple TV+ series The Essex Serpent because she couldn’t balance filming and caring for her kids during lockdown.
In other words, the young woman who was derisively written off as a costume drama clothes horse, good for standing around looking haughty in a corset and not much else, has proved her detractors wrong time and again. Once her daughters are older, she’d be keen to try writing and directing for the screen: “The world is an interesting place and there are other things in it I’d like to discover,” she told The Times. For now, though, you get the sense that Knightley is finally having fun in her career. She certainly deserves it.
‘Black Doves’ is streaming on Netflix from 5 December
