Given a choice Keira Knightley, the 22-year-old British actress who has made her mark appearing in a slew of period films, would probably prefer to spend more time in the past than have to sort out her present. She’s a white-hot Oscar nominee, but she’s also a young woman who has to use decoy cars to elude the paparazzi camped outside her London flat 24/7. And she can barely go anywhere without her “Ninja” in tow.
Ninja is James McAvoy’s term for his “Atonement” co-star’s beefy bodyguard, who wasn’t with her on the crisp autumn day we met in a Mayfair hotel suite to chat about “Atonement,” another period film that already has critics buzzing about a possible second Oscar nomination for Knightley.
In fact, the actress was all alone in a spacious room gently illuminated by the midday sun. The solitude seemed to suit her as she talked about playing a conflicted rich girl who falls for the servant’s son in her new film that hits theaters on Friday, fame, growing pains, her love of classic films and time travel while sipping a cup of tea.
“I’ve done a lot of modern-day pieces — “Bend it Like Beckham,” “Love Actually” and “The Jacket” — but I do like period films,” Knightley said while curling her legs underneath her lithe frame. “I think if you’re working in England, more often than not you’re going to be working in period pieces. I’ve loved them from a very, very early age. It was always the period films that I got absolutely obsessed by.”
Clearly this is a good time for Knightley. Although she claims that she’s “unbelievably dumb,” she’s either been smart enough to have made the right choices in her career or smart enough to have hired smarter people to make the right moves for her. Since her breakthrough role as a soccer player in “Beckham,” she has been nominated for an Oscar for “Pride & Prejudice,” the film that initially paired her with Joe Wright who also directed her in “Atonement” and she’s appeared in one of the most financially successful film franchises of all time — “Pirates of the Caribbean.” She’s currently shooting another period film called “The Duchess,” recently completed a WWII drama called “The Edge of Love” and her Chanel fragrance was launched in September.
“You forget how young she is because she’s done so much work,” says McAvoy, who plays Knightley’s love interest Robbie in “Atonement.” “But she’s just a young girl. She’s good fun, always a good laugh. But she’s got her head screwed on. When she’s at work, she’s at work and she’s quite formidable actually.”
One of the keys to her success is that Knightley, who has been acting since she was six years old, gets it.
“I think that this is an industry of smoke and mirrors,” she said. “I think everybody thinks they know what the entertainment industry is and very few people actually do. I think the wonderful thing about having been a child actor is that I’ve seen the truth of it from a very, very early age so I’ve never come into this with the idea of what it was going to be. I always saw a kind of reality and I think that’s kind of helpful.
“But it is harsh and if you don’t have the support there it’s very easy to crumble under the strain of that.”
Although Knightley’s parents were both actors, they were initially mortified and refused their three-year-old daughter’s request for an agent. Three years later, however, they caved when the headmaster at Knightley’s school told them that they needed to “dangle a carrot” in front of her because she was not doing well in school. So, her mother Sharman made her a deal. If she promised to come to her mother every day during the summer holiday with a book in her hand and a smile on her face, they would get her an agent.
She did.
“I don’t remember asking for one when I was three, but I remember the fight of trying to get one,” Knightley said with a laugh. “When you’re six you been fighting for something you want for half your life, which is a long (freaking) time!”
Knightley often finds herself having to fight different battles these days. Last year she successfully sued the Daily Mail for running a caption underneath a photo of her in a bikini that suggested that her anorexia caused the death of a teen girl. Knightley is thin, but she’s far from being skeletal.
“It’s going to be the weight or it’s going to be something else,” she says with a slight sigh. “You can’t win. I can’t pay that much attention to it. I think it’s not very healthy. I don’t read it. The only reason I found out about the (Daily Mail) story is because my agent rang and said there’s been this thing and we’ve got to do something about it because this is quite bad. Otherwise, honestly, I don’t think I would have known.”
But even though she’s got so much going for her, Knightley, whose mother once said she was born 45 and would meet herself when she was 22, has yet to shed some of her insecurities.
“I feel that within what I do I’ve still got huge barriers of my own making, not of anyone else’s and those points creatively as far as acting goes that I feel I really can’t get to at the moment,” she said emphatically. “So, I still feel like I’m still very much trying to break things down in order to be better. I hope that actually will never stop. I think that you can never be too comfortable in your ability.”
Playing Cecilia was challenging for Knightley, who like Wright, wanted to nail all of the nuances of a woman of privilege in 1940s Britain. Although Wright initially wanted Knightley to play Cecilia’s younger sister Briony, whose deception alters the lives of everyone around her, Knightley fought to play Cecilia.
“I loved her brittle quality,” Knightley said. “I loved the journey she went on. I thought it was fascinating that you’ve kind of got this character who has so many feelings bubbling underneath her. When I first read the script it made me cry. Anything that kind of provokes that kind of reaction is kind of good.”
Miki Turner can be reached at .