What is it about Keira Knightley that gets people all riled up?

What is it about Miss Knightley that gets so many people riled? Surely it can’t be because she is talented, rich and beautiful, asks our film critic and long-standing admirer David Sexton
Screen sensation: Knightley at the 2012 Hollywood premiere of Anna Karenina, a role for which she drew criticism from some quarters (Picture: Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP Images)
Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP Images
David Sexton13 November 2014

In her new film, the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game (out tomorrow), Keira Knightley plays Joan Clarke, the co-worker to whom the gay genius was briefly engaged while both were code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the war.

Andrew Hodges, the author of the definitive biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, credited in the film, has protested that the casting doesn’t “strike him as right”. He tried to put it as politely as he could: “I’m not being rude about her but Joan Clarke was no glamour puss…” No, indeed. Some papers have unkindly printed a photo of the real Joan Clarke alongside a pic of Keira and the contrast just makes you laugh despite yourself.

But films is films and the casting works. Keira is great in The Imitation Game, playing opposite Benedict Cumberbatch, partly because both have such striking and exaggerated looks that they work perfectly together — Cumberbatch’s face so long and narrow it looks as if it has been stretched, Knightley with those weirdly flat planes above that raptor jaw; his eyes so icily blue and slanted, hers so shining and dark.

Keira is genuinely touching, especially in the scene (SPOILER ALERT) when she tells Turing that she wants to carry on with the engagement after he has told her he is homosexual — “We’ll have each other’s company, we’ll have each other’s minds…” You really want Turing to be won over, just as the film needs you to be.

Successful star: Keira Knightley attends a screening of The Imitation Game hosted by Chanel (Picture: Getty)
Getty

Here she has tamped down the skittishness and coltishness, the pouting and snickering that have marred some of her roles. In too many films recently, including Say When, released just last week, she has played a charming ingénue having difficulty with adulthood. And it has fairly infuriated the reviewers. “Her ‘I’m-a-real-girl’ smile proves maddening,” wrote Charlotte O’Sullivan, while Peter Bradshaw called it “a teeth-grating performance of intolerable gawkiness”.

Really? Knightley seems often to attract an almost visceral dislike. Some film reviewers don’t just think that sometimes she doesn’t act well in a particular film, they then express dislike of her just for being her (which, of course, is what you get when a performance doesn’t succeed).

For Keira Knightley herself, regardless of her films, has long attracted bizarrely hostile attitudes, especially from women. A columnist once advised: “If you want to befriend a woman, ask her the question, ‘What do you think of Keira Knightley?’ In the resulting torrent of bile and loathing, you will bond.”

It’s not only Twitter snarkery, either. The respected Guardian journalist Emma Brockes launched an attack on her for taking on the role of Anna Karenina (“Why I fear Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina is a trainwreck”), based merely on having seen the trailer. “OK, so there’s the accent thing… There’s the stricken, owl-eyed, Acting is Taking Place expression… And, there’s no getting around it, there’s the jaw thing… in part because of her jaw and the uses she puts it to, you are never in any doubt that you are watching Keira Knightley… She is always just so Knightley.” Ouch! As it happened, Keira made an excellent Anna — just as she has been notably good in a surprisingly large number of films now, including Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, The Duchess and Never Let Me Go.

So that’s the jaw thing. More recently, there’s been the breast thing. For the September issue of Interview magazine, Knightley posed topless for the photographer Patrick Demarchelier, on the condition that the picture wouldn’t be Photoshopped, explaining that this was a protest against the media’s demands on body image.

“I think women’s bodies are a battleground and photography is partly to blame,” she said. “I’ve had my body manipulated so many times for so many different reasons…” So she agreed to the topless shot “because it does feel important to say it really doesn’t matter what shape you are”. Her own shape, as it happens, was revealed as perfectly exquisite but the point probably remains.

Stunning: Keira at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Governors Awards in Los Angeles

Women, not men, piled in to the subsequent debate as to whether this move was sound feminism or not. One die-hard click-baiter, again in The Guardian — in an article that unimprovably began, “It’s difficult to escape breasts these days” — excitedly proclaimed: “If 2014 ends up the year of the breast, it will be because women made it happen on their own terms.”

But other pundits were not convinced, saying that “though such pictures purport to push back firmly against the pressure placed on women by the artificially perfect images of female celebrities… what they do, really, is perpetuate the idea that a woman’s body is, ultimately, the most interesting thing about her, and it exists to be scrutinised and judged by others”. Though her intention may have been good, she should have kept her clothes on was the severe conclusion.

And all this too was, of course, just further scrutiny and judgment of this 29-year-old actress by other women. It’s not as if Keira Knightley has ever said or done anything at all dislikeable. On the contrary, in every interview ever, she seems steadily nice, modest about her achievements (“I had success very young. I found that confusing and rather frightening for a long time. I didn’t feel I deserved it”), frequently funny, always talking a lot of sense.

Forever young: the 29-year-old actress in Say When

In an interview with Celia Walden recently, for example, she said she would discourage any daughter she had from becoming an actress. “I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. It can be completely heartbreaking for most people who do it because the amount of rejection is enormous… So I would say to my daughter, ‘Be a doctor or lawyer — something stable and useful’.” What could be more sensible than that?

So why such bitching? One of her directors, John Maybury, once explained it simply enough: “People resent success, particularly in this country. She’s thin, she’s rich, she’s beautiful, she’s talented — what’s to like?” That’s a standard tall-poppies line but it doesn’t quite get to why Knightley has been the target of such intense hostility and jealousy.

Maybe it’s simple. Maybe it’s just that, even more than she’s an actress, invariably good, she’s a star, an actual film star. And that means you do respond always to her, for herself as well as to her part. That’s what struck me the first time I ever saw her in a film, Maybury’s Dylan Thomas biopic, The Edge of Love, back in 2008. It made me think of the way Bob Dylan sings about loving any film that had Gregory Peck in it: “He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about/ But I’ll see him in anything, so I’ll stand in line.”

That’s just how some of us feel about Keira Knightley. Sorry. I guess it really could be pretty annoying?

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