Keira Knightley’s big break arrived in 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha’s comedy-drama about female footballers, which put her into the premier league. Before that, she’d had smaller parts in the 2002 gritty British drama Pure, about a mother with a heroin addiction, and the 2001 thriller The Hole, set in an eerie abandoned nuclear fallout shelter. Before that, she’d played Natalie Portman’s decoy in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. The reasoning being, well … Portman and Knightley do look a bit similar, don’t they?
Since those days, Knightley has earned two Oscar, two Bafta and four Golden Globe nominations, for Pride and Prejudice, The Imitation Game, Atonement and the TV series Black Doves. She was nearly cast as Bond girl Vesper Lynd in 2006’s Casino Royale (Eva Green was thought to be more age appropriate). She also nearly played Lois Lane in 2006’s Superman Returns instead of Kate Bosworth, and Catwoman in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises instead of Anne Hathaway. In an old episode of The Graham Norton Show (you can tell it’s a while ago – 2014 – because Norton doesn’t have a beard), Knightley tells a story about how Joe Wright, who directed her in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, 2007’s Atonement and 2012’s Anna Karenina, originally didn’t want to cast her because she was “too pretty”. “But then he met me and said: ‘Oh no, you’re fine,’” she laughs.
Knightley has been voted the person with the UK’s second sexiest voice, behind Sir Sean Connery, was made an OBE in 2018, supports West Ham, and apparently suffers from dentophobia (fear of dentists). Now she can also add “children’s author” to her CV, having written and illustrated her first book, called I Love You Just the Same, about a girl navigating the changing dynamics that come with the arrival of a sibling. So maybe you’d like to ask her about that when she sits for the Film & Music reader interview? Please get in your questions by noon on Thursday 4 September, and we’ll print her answers in Film & Music and online.
• I Love You Just the Same, written and illustrated by Keira Knightley, is published on 23 October by Simon & Schuster Children’s Books
