In considered one of Love Really’s most memorable scenes, Keira Knightley’s character Juliet gazes at a video from her marriage ceremony. Her pretty face has been captured in an unsettling close-up by her new husband’s greatest good friend, the equally unsettling Mark, performed by Andrew Lincoln. “I look fairly fairly,” she trills, a manic pixie posh lady slowly being engulfed by an enormous baker boy cap. That line, delivered when Knightley was simply 18, appeared to set the tenor for the way she could be perceived by her viewing public thereafter. Lovely, however very conscious of it. A contact self-satisfied. Poised to a frankly annoying extent.

Greater than 20 years on, Knightley is enjoying one other photogenic spouse in one other Christmas-set ensemble piece. Within the Netflix sequence Black Doves, the now 39-year-old performs Helen, who’s married to (and dishonest on) a high-ranking politician. To date, so Richard Curtis. Till we be taught that Helen is a spy in deep cowl and a part of a global espionage ring – and her double life is about to meet up with her in an enormous means.

Beneath her elegant look – all fancy tonal knitwear and the kind of tousled updos which are designed to look easy however require hours of wrangling in entrance of the mirror – she is livid, humorous and engaging, She’s additionally alarmingly good at repurposing her fancy kitchen implements to keep off assassins. Black Doves is simply the most recent in a string of very totally different initiatives inviting us to rethink the picture of Knightley that we’ve been carrying round in our heads for the reason that early Noughties – and to look again on the criticism and vitriol that was directed on the younger actor because of this.

So how did Knightley grow to be considered one of our most unfairly divisive stars? Regardless of the interval drama-ready RP accent, she will not be considered one of British performing’s minor aristocrats. As a substitute, she was born right into a theatrical household: her father Will and mom Sharman Macdonald labored as jobbing actors, and the latter wrote performs. In actual fact, Knightley has stated she owes her existence to “a wager”. Macdonald wished a second baby, however her husband informed her that “the one means they may afford to have one was if she bought a play” (her script for Once I Was a Woman, I Used to Scream and Shout was picked up by the Bush Theatre in 1984, the yr earlier than Knightley was born).

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Rising up listening to her dad and mom taking cellphone calls from their respective brokers, a precocious Knightley determined that she’d fairly like a type of, too. She signed with one on the age of six and appeared in adverts, kids’s TV and the compulsory episode of The Invoice. Her first massive break got here in 1999, when she appeared in Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace as Sabé, a woman in ready and decoy for Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala (she was forged for her hanging resemblance to Portman).

A couple of years later, she starred as Jules, greatest good friend and teammate to Parminder Nagra’s football-mad Jess in Gurinder Chadha’s culture-clash comedy Bend It Like Beckham. After which got here what she would later consult with as a “very tough five-year window” that made Knightley’s profession and broke her within the course of. In 2003, she appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, donning a corset to play Elizabeth Swann, who begins out as an 18th-century damsel in misery earlier than studying to fend for herself in distinctly Twenty first-century style.

Again then, a pirate film impressed by a Disney theme park attraction didn’t essentially look like a surefire success: Knightley’s buddies joked “Nicely, that’s your profession over then” when she was forged, she later informed the Telegraph. However the movie, which additionally starred Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp, was an enormous hit. It made 18-year-old Knightley well-known all over the world – and made her the goal of media obsession and vitriol within the course of.

Critiquing her efficiency and her persona turned a sport: she was too pouty, too posh, too picket, too skinny, a garbage actor and a horrible position mannequin. No surprise that the movie and its sequels occupy “a really confused place” in Knightley’s head. “It’s a humorous factor when you could have one thing that was making and breaking you on the similar time,” she informed The Instances final month, including: “They had been essentially the most profitable movies I’ll ever be part of, they usually had been the explanation that I used to be taken down publicly.” Love Really was launched just a few months after the primary Pirates, and solely supplied extra fodder. “There was a really very long time when [interviewers] had been all: nicely, you’re a s*** actor and also you’re anorexic and folks hate you’, which, for a young person or anyone of their early twenties, is a really unusual factor,” Knightley informed Elle UK.

These attitudes weren’t simply confined to newsprint both. Mentioning Knightley’s identify in dialog within the early Noughties tended to impress eye-rolls and dialogue of how annoying she appeared, all for the sins of enjoying underwritten characters and looking out glamorous on pink carpets. She occupied an unattainable, contradictory place: she appeared to embody the prevailing magnificence normal of the period, however on the similar time, we couldn’t cease speaking about what was perceived to be flawed about that magnificence. Younger ladies appeared to be inspired to aspire to seem like her and to despise her on the similar time. One Guardian article even went as far as to border Knightley-baiting as a twisted type of feminine bonding: “If you wish to befriend a lady, ask her the query, ‘What do you consider Keira Knightley?’”

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But Knightley’s profession went from power to power. She was forged as Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Delight and Prejudice and earned an Oscar nomination for the position (regardless of some murmurings about whether or not her seems to be precluded her from enjoying Jane Austen’s witty heroine: even her director admitted he’d initially written her off as “simply too fairly”). Her subsequent collaboration with Wright, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, introduced her a Bafta nomination. However her success solely made her extra of a goal: Wright, who noticed her ascent first hand, has stated that he “wouldn’t want the extent of press harassment she received on [his] personal 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, “photos of girls falling aside” might command “massive cash” on the time. “In case you weren’t breaking down in entrance of them, then it was price their whereas to make you break down in entrance of them,” she stated. “So all of a sudden there was a degree of violence, it felt, within the air. That’s not a factor that anyone would react to nicely.” Her weight turned the topic of invasive questioning. In 2007, she received a libel declare towards the Every day Mail after the paper alleged that she had an consuming dysfunction (she donated her damages, and the identical sum once more, to the charity Beat). These insinuations, she later defined, had been significantly hurtful as a result of she had family and friends members who had skilled anorexia. And the criticism “made [her] assume ‘possibly my physique is one way or the other not proper. Or my face will not be proper.’”

On the age of twenty-two, Knightley had a psychological breakdown and was identified with post-traumatic stress dysfunction (one thing she solely made public in 2018). When she appeared on the Baftas in 2008, it was the primary time she’d left her home in three months; she’d undergone hypnotherapy to stop her having a panic assault on the pink carpet. She took a yr off and, as soon as her Pirates obligations had been all ticked off, began to tackle initiatives that stretched our notion of a “Keira Knightley position”.

She tried her hand at heartbreaking dystopian sci-fi in an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s By no means Let Me Go, starred in apocalyptic comedy Searching for a Buddy for the Finish of the World reverse Steve Carell and sang and performed the guitar in Start Once more. Her director in that movie, John Carney, made some scathing feedback about how that movie taught him to “by no means make a movie with supermodels once more” – which had been rapidly shouted down on social media, with a lot of Knightley’s previous collaborators supporting her. (If Carney – who later apologised – shared these remarks 10 years earlier than, you possibly can think about them being acquired with glee moderately than outrage.)

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And whereas, sure, she stored showing in costume dramas, there was usually one thing subversive about these roles, like her twitchy flip as a so-called “hysteric” in David Cronenberg’s bizarre psycho-period drama A Harmful Technique. Or her position as an excellent Bletchley Park codebreaker in The Imitation Sport. Or her energetic flip because the subversive French author in Colette. Interval items make sense to her as a result of they so usually painting ladies jostling towards very circumscribed expectations of femininity, she’s stated: “It’s such an overt cage you place the girl in. That’s at all times one thing I’ve actually recognized with.” And, as she bluntly put it in 2018, whereas historic items have provided her “very inspiring characters”, modern movies usually characteristic sexual violence in direction of ladies. “I don’t actually do movies set within the modern-day as a result of the feminine characters practically at all times get raped,” she informed Selection.

Certainly, as she’s received older, she’s grow to be extra outspoken in interviews, in regards to the points in her trade and about her private experiences. She’s movingly mentioned the influence of her trial-by-media as a younger lady (“It’s clearly a part of my psyche, given how younger I used to be when it occurred,” she informed The Instances, “I’ve been made round it”) and the way this has formed her hopes for the 2 younger daughters she shares along with her musician husband James Righton. In a 2018 essay, she shared a graphic account of giving beginning to her eldest baby, Edie, and railed towards the sexist strain for girls to look immaculate as new moms. And she or he’s additionally a vocal advocate for equal parenting, in addition to being considered one of few Hollywood stars to speak candidly about how their childcare preparations influence their profession: in 2020, she stepped again from the Apple TV+ sequence The Essex Serpent as a result of she couldn’t stability filming and caring for her youngsters throughout lockdown.

In different phrases, the younger lady who was derisively written off as a fancy dress drama garments horse, good for standing round trying haughty in a corset and never a lot else, has proved her detractors flawed again and again. As soon as her daughters are older, she’d be eager to strive writing and directing for the display: “The world is an attention-grabbing place and there are different issues in it I’d like to find,” she informed The Instances. For now, although, you get the sense that Knightley is lastly having enjoyable in her profession. She actually deserves it.

‘Black Doves’ is streaming on Netflix from 5 December