KMC Forums - Keira Knightley

Keira Christina Knightley was born March 26th 1985 in Teddington London, UK. Her father, Will Knightley, is an actor, and her mother, Sharman MacDonald, is an actress-turned-playwright who has written the plays "I Used to Scream and Shout" and "The Winter's Tale". She has an older brother.

Keira, who is dyslexic as is her brother, credits this as helping her to become an actress. At six she decided "that she wanted to be an actress- not at some distant point in the future, but right away. An unattainable ambition- or so it seemed. But Keira's mother, already concerned with her daughter's lack of incentive at school, made a deal with her. 'All right,' Keira was told. 'If you come to me every day during summer holidays with a book in your hand and a smile on your face, then at the end of summer holidays, I'll get you an agent.'

"Quite possibly her mother never expected she would deliver but Keira persevred with her reading and slowly but surely began conquering her dyslexia." [Quote by Jamie Portman, from Canwest News Service, Canada. Full article can be found here].

When she was seven she had her first professional role in "Royal Celebration", a TV movie. At 9 she was in "A Village Affair".

Other roles followed, including a bit part in "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace". The problem with that role was that as the decoy to Natalie Portman's Queen Padme Amidala, the studios wished to fool the audience into thinking that Portman had played both the decoy and the Queen when in reality, she hadn't.

Next came a role in "Oliver Twist", a UK adaption of Charles Dickens classic story. Afterwards she was cast as the lead in Disney's "The Princess of Thieves", a TV movie about Robin Hood's daughter.
This was followed by "The Hole", a British Pyschological Thriller, also starring Thora Birch.

Next came the short film "Deflation", then a role in the UK [and now worldwide] smash hit "Bend It Like Beckham". This great film is about an Indian girl, Jesminder "Jess" Bhamra, [Parminder K. Nagra], who wishes to play football [or soccer] much to the chagrin of her orthodox Sikh parents. Keira plays Juliette "Jules" Paxton who notices the talent that Jess has and recruits her to play for a woman's football team and ultimately becomes her best friend

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