She's beautiful, friendly, polished, professional and modest. So why do we refuse to love Keira Knightley?, writes Louise East
THE NIGHT AFTER I saw Keira Knightley's new movie, The Duchess, I dreamt of hair; animated swathes of it, roaming the earth and freaking people out. It's hardly surprising. I defy you to see Keira's on-screen hair and not come over a little crazy.
The Duchess tells the story of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and her loveless marriage to the Duke (Ralph Fiennes) who nurses a lip stiffer than a decade-dead corpse and brings his mistress to live in their home. Happily for the film-makers, Georgiana was a great-great-grand-something of Princess Diana, so parallels between the two fashion plates suffering a marriage made for three are easily drawn. Of the connection, Knightley says curtly: "I am Georgiana. I am not Diana."
But back to Keira Knightley's hair, which serves as a kind of Cliffs Notes to the main action. As Georgiana is transformed from a 17-year-old ingenue to the wife of one of England's most powerful men, and a fashion icon in her own right, her hair grows ever larger and more ornate.
When she first meets her husband's future mistress, the hair has teamed up with three yard-high ostrich feathers. When she throws her celebrity behind the Whig party in support of her future lover, Charles Grey, the hair appears to have had a run-in with a skulk of foxes and is liberally dusted with brushes and snouts.
Director Saul Dibb (previously known for Lahn-don gun crime movie Bullet Boy) likes to position the camera behind Georgiana as she hurries from one humiliation to the next. As the film progresses, this results in shot after disturbing shot of a giant box of hair scurrying down a corridor atop Knightley's tiny frame. Finally, the hair catches fire, giving Fiennes the unenviable task of declaiming the line, "Please put out Her Grace's hair" with a straight face.
Keira Knightley's hair is very small in real life. She perches on a leather armchair in Shoreditch House, a private members' club in East London, wearing a tartan shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. Around her neck, in what seems like a deliberate gift to the journalists queueing up to talk to her, hangs a delicate gold pendant of Nefertiti, the mythically beautiful queen of Egypt.
"Oh my God, the hair was so heavy," she says, those famous eyebrows shooting skywards. "They had to build me a hair stand." A what? "Like a music stand, only for my hair. It stood behind me so I could kind of prop my head into it to stop me falling over. There were metal bird cages inside the hair. Unbelievable."
Keira Knightley is something of a conundrum. Few Hollywood stars have provoked as much bile as Knightley. With startling regularity, she provokes scorn, not admiration. Critics return repeatedly to the somewhat wooden nature of her acting and the internet simmers with a kind of behind-the-bike-sheds sniping at everything from Knightley's weight to the way she wears a frock. Yet the 2008 Forbes list reckons her to be the second-highest-paid actress in Hollywood (after Cameron Diaz), having earned $32 million (€22 million) in 2007 alone.
At the age of 23, she is box-office cat-nip, a "name" who can get movies financed and guarantee opening weekend pay-outs. So someone's got to love her. The more I read, the more intrigued I am by the animus against her. There seemed to be no real reason for it, or certainly none that sets her apart from other female stars of her age.
She is beautiful, with a clutch of interesting and successful films under her belt, yet despite the Oscar nominations and the Chanel contract, she remains modest in interview. After dating Belfast-born "model/actor" Jamie Dornan for years, she is now seeing her Pride and Prejudice co-star, Rupert Friend, and shows no signs of running off with a married man, unlike her co-star in The Edge of Love, Sienna Miller. Sure, a few of her performances are of the Thunderbirds school, but no one who has lived through the wonderful Scarlett Johansson's dead-eyed turn in The Black Dahlia, or the gifted Natalie Portman's in Closer, can suggest the dislike of Knightley is purely down to lack of talent.
What it comes down to is that Knightley irritates people. It is not so much that she's a bad actor as that her acting rubs us up the wrong way. When Keira flits across the screen, or gazes out from beneath that hair, we bristle. Her beauty is undeniable but the underbite and arched eyebrows lend it a brittle, arrogant quality.
Although in real life she is more middle-class boho than aristo (her mother Sharman Macdonald is a screenwriter, most recently of The Edge of Love and her father, Will Knightley, an actor), her topiary-ed vowels in Atonement and the imperiousness of her Elizabeth Swann in the phenomenally successful Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, present her as a faintly scornful toff, which is never a popular proposition.
Of her recent role as Dylan Thomas's lover in The Edge of Love, Knightley says rather wistfully: "It was nice to play someone who was warm. I haven't played warm very often." Why does she think that is? "Because I'm always looking for the darker strain in scripts. I don't know why that is. [ Atonement's] Cecilia Tallis certainly wasn't warm. I think if you met her you'd probably think, 'What a bitch.' I like that."
In interview, Knightley is an unusual mix of friendliness, polished professionalism and galloping insecurity. She berates herself in real time with acidic little Post-its to herself: "Of course, I should have re-read the biography before I did the interview." Even though the waitress brings only one cup, she apologises for not sharing her tea.
She talks with great enthusiasm about why she loves acting - she loves pretending to be other people, loves exploring messy situations she would never dream of getting entangled in herself, loves even that there is no "fail-safe equation" that will guarantee a good movie: "You can have the most amazing group of people and still it might not work. That's exciting."
In almost the next breath, she calmly declares she's not happy with any of her own performances. "I think it's completely impossible to see yourself on screen pretending to be somebody else and to like it, don't you? I'm the only one who knows what I was trying to do and how I've failed to achieve it, so of course, I'm only going to see the mistakes." I ask her if she hopes to one day like one of her own performances. "No." Her lip curls ever so slightly. "I just don't think over-confidence is that helpful."
Notoriously, Knightley is said to have demanded her own agent at the age of three. Less widely reported is the explanation she offered on Jonathan Ross' TV show: "Because of my parents, agents rang the house all the time. I don't think I knew what they were. I just wanted one." She first appeared on television at the age of seven and, at the age of 16, co-starred in Bend it Like Beckham, which kick-started both the acclaim for her beauty and the less-than-flattering reviews. At an age when other teenagers were being congratulated for their efforts in the school play, Knightley was being roundly criticised in the national press. The barriers went up, never really to come down again.
Other than a few magazine-ish excursions into her love of cooking and learning to knit on the set of Pirates, she refuses point-blank to discuss her personal life. That has probably saved her sanity, but it hasn't won her friends in the tabloid press. She has been plagued by allegations of anorexia, something, which she has consistently, and increasingly angrily, denied.
"As far as being cautious about certain things, I suppose yes, I'm definitely very cautious. If I'm going to get drunk, I'm not going to do it in a public place. I'm cautious on a level that's probably inconceivable to somebody who's never been followed. I could spend all day going through everything I'm cautious about but I don't think it would make a very interesting interview." Knightley is understandably a little jaded on the subject of celebrity, yet it was one of the things that drew her to the part of Georgiana.
"She was this weird, huge fashion icon which is something I thought was a modern phenomenon. The way - how can I put this," she pauses and rolls her eyes thoughtfully. "The way women are constantly looked at, constantly taken apart. I thought that was specific to the celebrity age we're in now and it was fascinating to discover it was something that was around 300 years ago."
It is hard, when there are so few clues to making sense of Keira Knightley, not to seize on her discussions of her onscreen character as some kind of Rosetta Stone to her identity. Here, for example, is Knightley on Georgiana: "I think I was interested in how lonely she was, that epic loneliness when she was surrounded at all times by people. I thought that was probably why she was so needy. She had this tremendous desire to be looked at and admired because, essentially, she was so alone."
Also intriguing is her theory on the friendship between the Duchess and Lady Bess, the Duke's mistress (played by Hayley Atwell): "Within female friendships, there are always strange rivalries and jealousies and a certain amount of manipulation. Women today are as manipulative as they were 300 years ago, and I think that's interesting given how different our age is, politically and socially."
In a strange way, it is Knightley's inability or refusal to adopt these two modes - neediness and manipulation - which sets her apart. In a recent British poll of women between the ages of 18 and 25, the celebrity they most wanted to be was Amy Winehouse, a car crash of a genius who leads her personal pap pack to the petrol station where she buys an ice lolly and flicks through the papers, looking for pictures of herself.
Keira Knightley is unwilling to play that game. She is polite and self-contained in interview; composed and removed on screen. She does not show her need of us, and for that, we refuse to love her.
• The Duchess is on general release