February 1, 2008
By Geoffrey MacNab
'She walked into the audition room and oozed youthful vitality and confidence much like the character I wanted her to play. She was a delight to work with from start to finish and, from what I know, has remained very grounded, much like she was then," the writer-director Gurinder Chadha reflects on her first encounter with Keira Knightley, in the run-up to Bend It Like Beckham (2002), the film that made Knightley a star.
It is only five years since Knightley, then 17, played Jules Paxton, the ebullient and instantly likeable player for the Hounslow Harriers. By her own admission, her performance wasn't especially polished. Although she had been acting since she was a child, she hadn't been to drama school.
Nonetheless, in the five years since, Knightley has turned into the most bankable young actor in Britain. Opening today, Atonement marks the 22-year-old Knightley's coming of age as a serious actress.
Collaborators wax enthusiastically about Knightley's qualities on screen. "She really is a luminescent star," David Thompson, the head of BBC Films, says of her. "She is incredibly photogenic. She has that indefinable quality that makes the screen light up completely when she is on it. Of course, she is beautiful, but it is more than that. She has a lot of depth and she can really move an audience."
Like Gurinder Chadha, the Scottish director Gillies Mackinnon was instantly struck by her when she auditioned to play a teenage East End drug addict in his 2002 feature, Pure.
At first glance, a pretty, demure young teenager from Teddington didn't seem the obvious choice to play a working-class junkie. She walked into the audition holding an art folder, clearly having come straight from school. The producers were sceptical but Mackinnon talked them round. "I just had a feeling she is going to be a star."
Pure hints at what makes Knightley such a distinctive actress. She has a sylph-like quality reminiscent of old silent stars like Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford, slender figures with blanched faces, high cheekbones and mournful eyes.
At the same time, she is lively and mischievous - an archetypal girl-next-door. Performing her party trick, playing Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head on her teeth, or telling anecdotes to American chat-show hosts, she appears approachable. Wright shirked from casting her in Pride & Prejudice on the grounds that she was too beautiful.
He saw her as an aloof and porcelain-like figure, but was relieved to discover that Knightley in person was "this incredibly vital, independent, scruffy-like person."
It helps, too, that she has been able to work so consistently
. Not all her credits have been especially distinguished, but she has been able to play everything from Jane Austen heroines to bad-ass action women (in Tony Scott's Domino.)
What directors seem to like about her is that she can be moulded. As Jacques Helleu, the artistic director of Chanel, put it, after seeing Knightley in Pride & Prejudice: "Her natural flaws were visible… Keira wore no make-up. She wore lengths of fabric as dresses. She had almost no hairstyle, just a little bun."
As her popularity has grown, so has the resentment of her. She has become a cynosure for gossip columnists and Knightley is still not taken entirely seriously as an actress. Knightley invariably strikes a phlegmatic note about her sudden and enormous celebrity.
"If it all falls apart tomorrow, I have had a really nice run and so be it," she recently stated. "You can't expect the highs to last forever."
There is a sense that she is engaged in a delicate balancing act. Her fame has inevitably come at a cost. She was furious at rumours that she was suffering from anorexia, and recently won a libel action against a newspaper that suggested she had an eating disorder.
She can't be comfortable, either, with the relentless poring over her private life. Knightley may want to live an ordinary, grounded life, telling chat-show hosts about her leaking washing machine, her enthusiasm for Nigel Slater recipes or for cleaning out the fridge, but...
"Why would I want strangers to know me?" she asked in an interview adding that "the magic is in the screen, not knowing what is behind it."
She has also begun to mix and match Hollywood studio projects with more adventurous independent titles. In The Edge Of Love, by BBC Films and nearing completion, she plays what promises to be her most provocative role: Vera Phillips, a former teenage sweetheart of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
David Thompson believes that Atonement and The Edge Of Love will make audiences reconsider Knightley. "She has an extraordinary range and a real capacity to plumb depths of pain and sorrow, as well as a lighter side to her. That is a rarity. Not many have this range of qualities." - The Independent
|
|
  
 
|
