Keira Knightley is most persuasive when her characters have rules to resist. She brings conviction to literary heroines, though her firmness can look brittle; the early romantic roles give a much less useful measure of her acting.
Fi1m perspective
In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann must make us care about a romance the screenplay has barely developed. Gore Verbinski’s adventure is easy to recommend for Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush, but her scenes with Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner are thinner. We were frustrated by the love story because it interrupts characters who have been given more to say. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio give their eccentrics the attention the lovers needed. It is difficult to judge Knightley’s abilities from a part that asks so little of them.
Her breakthrough in Bend It Like Beckham (2002) was followed by the double exposure of Pirates and Love Actually (2003). Richard Curtis’s ensemble romance gives her Juliet, but it also gives too many of its cast abbreviated stories. Our mixed view of that film is not a verdict on Knightley’s performance. These two films explain her early prominence better than they explain what she can do with a substantial role.
The literary adaptations offer more useful evidence. Her Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Cecilia Tallis in Atonement (2007) belong to the line of women negotiating social constraints that has become central to her work. She brings conviction to that struggle, though the firmness can look brittle. At her most convincing, she makes compliance seem like hard work.
Smaller contemporary and independent films became a greater part of her work after the mid-2010s. In Official Secrets (2019), the focused, spare delivery gives a thriller a dependable centre. That is a useful corrective to the idea that her strength depends on a literary heroine and a period setting. We would start with Pride & Prejudice for Knightley herself, and keep Pirates for an evening when the adventure matters more than the love story.
Biography
Keira Knightley is an English actress. She was born on 26 March 1985 in Teddington, London, to actors Will Knightley and Sharman Macdonald. She obtained an agent at the age of six and began working in commercials and television films.
Knightley appeared as Sabé in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). Her breakthrough came with Bend It Like Beckham (2002). She achieved global recognition as Elizabeth Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), a role she reprised in later films in the series. She also appeared in Love Actually (2003) and Pride & Prejudice (2005), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Knightley was appointed an OBE in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity.
