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 Keira Knightley Full Biography Few actresses enjoy the kind of success Keira Knightley saw in 2003. First, her major picture starring debut, Pirates Of The Caribbean, entered the all-time Top 20 of box-office hits. Then, due to this success, her earlier low-budget effort, Bend It Like Beckham, already a cult smash, found its release widened dramatically, taking it into undreamed of profit. Following these with Love, Actually, the latest cute rom-com from Richard "Notting Hill" Curtis, her rise in a few short months would be nothing short of phenomenal. And still she was only 18.Yet, despite her tender years, Knightley already had a fair amount of working experience. Like such American actresses as Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles, she had begun her career at an absurdly young age. Unlike them, though, she had not done so through the actions of "pushy" parents. Knightley's focus was all her own, and had first become apparent at the absurdly young age of 3.
She was born Kiera Knightley on the 22nd of March, 1985, in Teddington, south-west London. Her name would become Keira as her Hollywood career took off, the change shamelessly breaking the golden rule of "I before E except after C" but making the name more easily pronounceable on a worldwide basis. Her father was stage actor Will Knightley, who'd make the occasional foray into television, such as starring as Mr Glegg in the BBC's 1997 production of The Mill On The Floss. Her Ayrshire-born mother, Sharman MacDonald, had also been a stage and TV actress (she once appeared in Shoestring). Having joined the Drama Society at Edinburgh University in 1972, then worked as a go-go dancer to pay her Drama School fees, she'd battled against stage fright for 12 years. Eventually, pregnant with Keira and having borne son Caleb five years earlier (he'd go on to teach music to underprivileged kids), in 1984 she gave up acting and concentrated on her family.
She also took up a career in playwriting and, after debuting with When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream And Shout, she proceeded to deliver such notable efforts as After Juliet, All Things Nice, The Brave, Sea Urchins, Shades and The Winter Guest, the last being taken to the big screen by Alan Rickman. On top of this, she'd write Wild Flowers and The Music Practice for TV, and a BBC documentary would be made about her, called Mindscape and featuring the young Keira.
Most kids like to join in with whatever their parents are up to, and Keira was no exception. At the age of 3, noticing that both Will and Sharman were getting regular calls from their respective agents, the young girl demanded one of her own. She was, of course, politely refused, but was insistent in her requests for the next several years. By the time she was 6, her mother struck a bargain with her. As the child had recently been diagnosed as dyslexic, she said that if Keira came to her every day of the summer holidays and spent an hour working on her reading and maths, she would provide her with professional representation. This challenge was important. Up until this point Keira had been ridiculed by her schoolmates for her supposed stupidity. In fact, her dyslexia meant she couldn't read words and wrote numbers backwards. It got so bad that she'd get hold of book-tapes and memorise them so that no one would recognise her failings.
To Sharman's surprise, the child complied and then forced her mother to keep to the bargain. And, to mum's horror, the new agent did his work well. At age 7, Keira filmed her TV debut, Royal Celebration, concerning the complicated lives and loves in a London square at the time of Prince Charles' marriage to Diana Spencer and featuring the likes of Kenneth Cranham, Minnie Driver and Rupert Graves.
 Fearing their daughter would begin to neglect her schoolwork - a potential disaster for a dyslexic - Keira's parents told her she could only pursue her new career during the summer holidays. So, throughout the mid-Nineties, she did just that. 1994 brought a minor role in Joanna Trollope's controversial drama A Village Affair, featuring a lesbian relationship between Sophie Ward and Kerry Fox. Yet again Keira found herself amidst a heavy-duty cast, including Claire Bloom and Jeremy Northam.1995 brought Innocent Lies, set in 1938, where an aristocratic family in a small seaside town are suspected of complicity in a murder. Joanna Lumley played the Nazi-supporting matriarch, while daughter Gabrielle Anwar and son Stephen Dorff hid some terrible secret - Keira playing the young Anwar in flashback. The next year saw another period drama in E. Nesbit's Treasure Seekers where a poor widowered inventor worked on a breakthrough in refrigeration while his five kids tried to help - Keira playing The Princess, a neat presaging of what was soon to come. This time her lofty co-stars included James Wilby, Gina McKee and Ian Richardson.
Meanwhile, Keira's education continued at Teddington School, a classy and well-funded establishment thats grounds extended to the banks of the Thames, where it had its own slipway for launching boats. With 10 science laboratories, a TV studio and a Music and Drama block it offered great opportunities. Through her early teens Keira would make the most of her spare time, too, attending drama workshops at the nearby Heatham House youth club. This was an extremely forward-looking club, established some 50 years before, where artists, musicians, dramatists and youth workers would teach kids such fun subjects as photography, football, DJing, breakdancing, skateboarding and acting. This was where Keira would gain most of her early acting experience. And, remember, for her this was a normal situation. Unlike the millions who seek instant celebrity by banging out soul-less karaoke on Pop Idol or scoring a part on some wretched soap-opera, Knightley did not equate acting with fame or big bucks. Due to her parents' efforts and lifestyle, she saw it simply as a job that needed to be learned.
Come 1998, it was back to period drama with Rosamund Pilcher's TV epic Coming Home. This saw Keira (who was "Introduced" in the credits) as Judith Dunbar, a quiet girl sent to an English boarding school by her parents in the colonies in the 1930s. Here she's befriended by a rich girl and eventually, due to tragedy in the family, taken in by the girl's folks, the movie following the lives of the two girls as they suffer class divisions and WW2. The older Judith would be played by Emily Mortimer, who'd fall for her friend's brother Paul Bettany, the cast also featuring Peter O'Toole and, once again, Joanna Lumley.
While still at Teddington School, Knightley received a most extraordinary offer - to play a handmaiden of Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala in the forthcoming The Phantom Menace, part one of the Star Wars saga and perhaps the most hotly anticipated movie in history. In fact, as the plot required her to dress as Portman and thus act as a decoy, she would, to all intents and purposes, be appearing AS Queen Amidala. Trouble was, with George Lucas keeping his cards so close to his chest, this plot-twist, and thus Keira's presence in the movie, was kept absolutely secret. She was, therefore, perhaps the only actress ever to not have her career boosted by a prime role in one of the biggest hits ever.
As said, fame was not really the point for Keira, and her next role was a satisfying one. It came at a good time, too. Upset at school due to a constant breaking up with friends mostly caused by her work, things had got so bad that a week before her 13th birthday her mother had allowed her to have her belly-button pierced - just to cheer her up. What cheered her more, though, was a part in Alan Bleasdale's adaptation of Oliver Twist, a work that courageously stretched beyond Dickens' work to enrich the characters and story. Here Keira played the young aunt of Oliver who, along with kindly executor Mr Brownlow, tries to protect the boy from his homicidal half-brother and, of course, the manipulative Fagin.
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