Thursday, March 10, 2011

Keira Knightley Biography

Keira Knightley  Biography


Few actresses enjoy the kind of success Keira Knightley saw back 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 emotional bludgeon from Richard “Notting Hill” Curtis, Knightley's rise in a few short months would be nothing short of phenomenal. And still she was only 18. Within a further three years she'd be Oscar-nominated and one of the most sought-after screen actresses in the world.

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 a very early 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 Kenneth Cranham, Minnie Driver and Rupert Graves.  At one stage, young Keira and her older buddies would slip away to watch the wedding on TV, being thrilled by the married couple's brief kiss then shocked by the site of a couple kissing in the crowd, someone they know, someone who shouldn't be kissing who they're kissing.
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. There'd also be an appearance in the long-running cop show The Bill where Knightley would play a tearaway fleeing but then caught by two policemen. Naturally they patronize her caustically as they search her bag for stolen goods, her repeated defence being "It ain't mine". 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.

from - http://www.talktalk.co.uk/

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