Keira Knightley's next shrewd move: 'Atonement'

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By Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Yes, she adores her three Chanel handbags and the dainty patent-leather lace-up Christian Louboutin booties she wore to a press lunch earlier in the week.
But Keira Knightley is even more passionate about her current reading material, a light, fluffy romp called Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny.


REVIEW: 'Atonement' is a lovely compensation, but falters in the middle
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CLIP: Check out the chemistry between Knightley and James McAvoy
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\"It's the one about Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. It's amazing. It was actually given to me recently,\" says Knightley. \"It's completely terrifying — this guy, who has committed these horrendous crimes. I highly recommend it, but it's certainly not happy reading.\"

No wonder director Joe Wright, who has worked with Knightley on the new drama Atonement and her current Chanel Coco Mademoiselle perfume ad campaign, calls her \"very smart.\"


\"She doesn't suffer fools,\" he adds. \"She knows her own mind.\"

He is echoed by Gore Verbinski, who directed Knightley in the Pirates of the Caribbean series: \"She's bookish. She reads a lot. When there's downtime, she'll be curled up in a corner reading a book, waiting for the next setup. There's not a lot of showiness with her. She's a keen observer. She's shrewd.\"

That's certainly obvious both by her demeanor and her choices. At 22, Knightley belongs to a select group of Hollywood stars that includes Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson — bright young women who are circumspect about their private lives and clever about their professional moves, mixing mainstream audience-pleasers with more intimate, artsy films.

For Knightley, that means following up the trio of Pirates blockbusters with Atonement, opening today. It's the blue-chip adaptation of Ian McEwan's best-selling novel about Cecilia, a posh, icy young woman (Knightley) who falls for Robbie (James McAvoy), the educated but impoverished son of the family's housekeeper, only to have her younger sister (Saoirse Ronan) accuse him of a nasty crime he didn't commit.

Knightley was drawn to the power of Cecilia's story as a privileged, pampered young woman who turns her back on her society family by siding with her lover.

\"I saw her as behaving badly in the beginning, but I didn't think of her as a deep-down unlikable person,\" says Knightley. \"She's a snob. There's a time when everyone behaves like a bitch. And she's behaving like a bitch. There's no doubt about it. But she makes a sacrifice by walking away from her family, and that kind of glamour-puss existence that's making her completely unhappy.\"

While Knightley remains the film's biggest star and likely its main draw, it's McAvoy's face and name that are first on the movie posters — thanks to Knightley. \"He should have got top billing anyway,\" she says. \"I think, contractually, I had it, but I sort of thought it was ridiculous. It just wasn't right.\"

A new phase

The film represents the second big-screen pairing of Knightley and Wright, who directed her to her first Academy Award nomination for 2005's Pride & Prejudice. There's plenty of Oscar buzz surrounding the movie, but reviews have been mixed, with some critics dubbing the film a gilded but passionless tableau.

Yet, Variety praised it as \"Knightley and McAvoy's film, with both showing impressive star poise and physical élan. As the more controlled Cecilia, Knightley hints at the rebel behind the upper-middle-class mask.\" And, wrote Newsweek's David Ansen, \"the chemistry between Knightley and McAvoy is white-hot: her brittle, chilly Cecilia comes to life in his presence.\"

Certainly, it's the first time that Knightley, who kicked off her career as a soccer-mad tomboy in 2002's Bend It Like Beckham and spunkily caterwauled her way through King Arthur, Domino and the Pirates movies, plays a mature, regal woman on screen.

\"That's one of the things that was quite exciting about casting her as Cecilia,\" says Wright, who met Knightley when she was 18. \"It felt like the first role in which she got to be a proper woman and really play with this new phase in her life creatively and personally.\"

On screen in Atonement, Knightley's Cecilia can freeze someone with one glance, but in person the actress is \"absolutely nothing like that,\" says Wright. \"That's one of the most commendable things about this performance, is the fact that she is willing and brave enough to be disliked by the audience. She's very bold.\"

It's a description that leaves Knightley slightly baffled. She's a sliver of a girl clad in a bulky black coat, a normally fiery sprite whose spark is subdued today after a rapid-fire schedule of travel and interviews. She's lacking the energy to even do some Christmas shopping, despite her increased buying power thanks to the sagging dollar compared with the British pound. But, she laments, \"department stores scare the hell out of me. This time of year, I can't handle it. I can't quite face the hordes.\"

She's definitely outspoken, hurling four-letter words non-stop, revealing her penchant for Indiana Jones movies, giggling at one particularly revealing dress she wore on the red carpet, ridiculing rumors that she doesn't eat as she digs into a lunch combination of chicken soup, bread and coffee.

But bold?

\"What does bold mean? Brave? Not particularly,\" Knightley breaks off, looking from her coffee cup to her nearly empty bowl of soup. \"This isn't a very good combination, is it? Isn't chicken noodle soup meant to have some healing power? If you've got a cold, isn't that what you're meant to have? I like the fact that I'm eating something that's quite healing.\"

She then returns to the issue of boldness: \"I don't know about brave and bold. I just do what feels right to me.\"

About that boyfriend …

Like Cecilia, Knightley has her off days and can be a rhymes-with-witch. \"I think everybody is, aren't they? I have my moody moments,\" she says. \"What sets me off? Really, anything.\"

Then she adds, \"I'm probably (lying) to make me sound more interesting.\"

The tabloids, however, find her plenty interesting without her own embellishment. Knightley doesn't read the weeklies, though, and says she isn't aware of most of the things written about her.

The key word is \"most\": Earlier this year, Knightley won nearly $6,000 in damages from the publishers of Britain's Daily Mail after the newspaper ran a story implying that she had an eating disorder.

During an interview at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Knightley brushed off speculation about her thinness. \"I'm very glad I'm not anorexic or I wouldn't have been able to climb mountains. We went to Bhutan — sorry, the royal we. Me and a friend went to Bhutan.\"

That \"friend\" is the one topic she won't discuss: her boyfriend, British actor Rupert Friend. At a time when anything seems up for grabs with stars, Knightley's personal life remains off limits. \"I never felt comfortable with (revealing personal details). Again, it's comfort levels. I'm just not comfortable.\"

So, does she believe in one great, all-consuming love, like the romance between Robbie and Cecilia in Atonement?

\"I don't know. That's the point of film, to present that. (Relationships) are never that clean-cut, are they?\" says Knightley. \"That's the good thing about film. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. A happily ever after, or they all die.\"

Unwanted entourage

In some ways, Knightley is conflicted about her life. On the one hand, she's \"passionate\" about making movies. On the other, she'd like to go out to eat without cameras around.

Dealing with paparazzi \"did get really bad for a minute or two, and it wasn't worth it. I was just feeling (bad) about myself and not for any other reason than I had men following me around all over the place,\" she says. \"I felt terrified all the time, and that's not worth it.

\"But it has eased off in England, and that's brilliant. It's a difficult thing. I cannot imagine what else I'd do, but yet I am fully for self-preservation. I can't deal with any more attention than I've got.\"

She manages her level of fame well, says McAvoy. \"It's not easy for her. Keira has a lot of class. She doesn't turn up to an opening of an envelope, to the latest Samsung phone launch. She doesn't use the press on purpose. She doesn't ask for it.\"

And she doesn't care that if she does appear in the celebrity magazines, it's usually with a scowl on her face as she's snapped out shopping or running errands at home in London.

\"It's not the pictures. … If they wanted bad pictures, I could provide them myself. It is being followed all the time,\" she says.

She'll be spending the holidays with family in England, now that she has wrapped the historical drama The Duchess. This time, she plays the legendary gambler and society mover-and-shaker Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. \"The costumes were amazing, the wigs were great,\" says Knightley, who wore spectacularly corseted gowns. \"At the end of the day, it took me 10 minutes to learn to breathe normally.\"

She's looking forward to catching her breath after a year of working non-stop. \"I'm completely, as my mum would put it, fancy-free and floating,\" says Knightley. \"I'm going to sit back and be very selfish about what I do next and do something that really interests me.\"

Sounds reasonable. Is Knightley really that balanced and sensible?

\"Not at all,\" she says, giggling. \"I'm just pretending.\"

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