CLASSICALLY KEIRA
by Jeff Gordinier
The A-list actress dishes to ELLE on why she’s not just another pretty face.
On a cold, pewter-gray evening in London, Keira Knightley is asked if she remembers the first time she became aware of her own sexual power.
“Oh, my God,” she says, taken aback. “I don’t think I’m aware of it now.” This doesn’t seem plausible. “No, you’re right,” she says. “I’m lying. I’m lying. I don’t know why I said that.” She reconsiders. “No, I’m not lying, actually,” she says. “I’ll just have an argument with myself!”
She’s laughing, and her laugh is throaty and uninhibited, but there’s something about all of this Wimbledon-style back-and-forth that’s worth taking note of. Let me explain.
In the Hollywood scheme of things, Knightley qualifies as a classic beauty. Every era must have at least one, and the movies have blessed us with many over the years, from ­Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo to Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie ­Foster, and Uma Thurman. The classic beauty must be stunning, of course, but in a very specific way. If, in unofficial ­Hollywood parlance, a total babe tends to be an overtly sexual bombshell with a dash of the girl next door, a classic beauty comes across as more intellectual, regal, exquisite. She stands out in the culture because of her refinement and high standards, and she generally needs to have cheekbones that look, in profile, as though Bernini had carved them from marble.
We can confidently say these things about Keira ­Knightley, and that helps us understand why designers such as Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, Valentino, Gucci, and Matthew Williamson have dressed her swanlike frame for the red carpet. It explains, too, why Chanel, a luxury brand that signifies classicism at its very core, has tapped Knightley to be the face of its Coco Mademoiselle fragrance. (Knightley’s brandishing a bowler hat in the Chanel ads. Bowlers are as classic beauty-ish as you can get.)
But Knightley has also mastered something else: In order to keep the fascination quotient high, a classic beauty must screw with the formula. When Knightley talks about “having an argument with myself,” she’s joking, yeah, but she’s inadvertently revealing something elemental about the role. Like those icons before her, she keeps us guessing.
In the mere five years since she managed to make blocky red soccer shorts alluring in Bend It Like Beckham, Knightley has, at 22, achieved the Hollywood ingenue’s equivalent of a World Cup victory, scoring her way to global domination with the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and proving, with her Oscar-nominated and hummingbird-subtle performance in 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, that she can act. But when you look at her ­career choices, it’s clear she has never had any intention of ­getting stuck playing damsels in distress.
Just as often, in fact, she has played damsels who cause distress: Consider her fierce, battle-hungry Guinevere in 2004’s King Arthur, or her belligerent, potty-mouthed bounty hunter in 2005’s Domino. “She had such an extraordinary ­experience with the pirate movies, where essentially she was sort of a chess piece, or a puppet, being moved around to serve the purposes of what those films do,” says John Maybury, who directed her in 2005’s The Jacket, an arty, disturbing meditation on the nature of free will. “At a certain point, she realized that she was an interchangeable object, and anyone could be that. So, having chosen to be an actor, I guess she wanted to do some acting.” Her efforts were occasionally written off, and in her first few years of fame she took plenty of flak for what seemed to be an ever-present supermodelish pout. By now, though, she has evolved into a stylist of remarkable delicacy, with the mobile, expressive eyes of a silent-film star and the sort of piercing, plummy vocal cadences that you’d expect from a grande dame on a West End stage. Even in the big movies, she’s very good at the tiny gestures. Matthew Rhys, the Welsh actor who costars with Knightley in a just-finished drama called The Edge of Love, puts it this way: “This is a girl who knows exactly how to work a close-up.”
This season, that evolution will reach a new height when Knightley stars in Atonement, a big-screen adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel that is, like Knightley herself, ­simultaneously old-school and contemporary, swellegant and profane. Her timing couldn’t be better. At a moment when her own generation seems to measure stardom by the number of skanked-out snapshots that appear in the tabloids, Knightley comes across as anachronistically committed to honing her craft and growing as an artist and all that sort of stuff. “So many actors her age do just kind of get waylaid and sidetracked with celebrity,” says James McAvoy, her Atonement costar. “She likes what she does, so why would she want to disrespect it? She’s very good at what she does, so why would she want to undermine people’s opinion of her?”
“What really sets me off?” Knightley asks. She’s leaning forward on the edge of a couch in a stance that suggests a boxer waiting for the bell. “Anything. I mean, really anything. I’m a moody bastard. Actually, I’ve been banned from reading newspapers because the way they’re written angers me so much. If I want an opinion, then I’ll read the opinion part of the newspaper. I do not want it when I’m trying to get the facts. I get incredibly angry. It really f–ks me off. See, I have to calm down about it.”
In spite of the gamine delicacy of her profile, nearly everything about Knightley seems primed for combat. Her arms look like those of an Olympic javelin thrower. Her legs have a sort of limber, birch-tree muscularity that you might associate with the Bryn Mawr field-hockey team. Even her eyes are athletic. They’re big and brown, and boxed in black mascara, and she aims them straight at you with the ­unwavering focus of a kid in a staring contest.
Her outfit on this gloomy night is a case study in the way a classic beauty can twist your expectations. The T-shirt from Barneys Co-op looks, with its black horizontal stripes, like something Hepburn would have played nine holes of golf in, and the pants are best described as something David Bowie might have worn to the coolest bullfight in Madrid in 1974. Jacqueline Durran, Atonement’s costume designer, custom-made the trousers when Knightley swooned over a similar pair on the set. They’re black and matadorishly high-waisted, with rows of large buttons down the front. Knightley has rolled the pant legs up to her knees, and on her feet she’s wearing black Converse sneakers, unlaced. Like Hepburn, her idol, she seems to get a kick out of dressing with tomboyish idiosyncrasy. Of course, the gorgeousness breaks through anyway, and it’s pretty much blinding.