why the Keira Knightley haters are wrong

On Monday evening, Bafta will host the latest in its Life in Pictures series in which some august film talent shares insight into their art. Previous recipients of this distinction include Meryl Streep, Martin Scorsese, Helen Mirren, Sam Mendes and Vanessa Redgrave. Next week, its star will be British actress Keira Knightley.

There will doubtless be a little eyebrow raising as to Knightley’s youth: at 33, some would argue that her life in pictures has only just begun. However, the main objection is likely to be Knightley herself, the collective dislike of whom appears akin to a national sport.

A few years ago, a columnist for a rival newspaper wrote: “If you want to befriend a woman ask her, ‘What do you think of Keira Knightley?’ In the resulting torrent of bile and loathing, you will bond. She will say, ‘I hate Keira Knightley. She’s such a terrible actress. She looks like a stoat. And those teeth! She makes my fists itch!’ It is a Pavlovian response. Hatred of Keira is like menstruation; all women share it.” 

Such is the ire that Knightley inspires that a woman at a dinner party once threatened to punch me after I defended the actress. Doubtless, these naysayers will feel vindicated by their nemesis’s performance as the baby-voiced Sugarplum in Disney’s Christmas vehicle, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms: a pretty, girly, winged menace, all teeth and flitting evil, masquerading as icky sweetness. 

In fact, Knightley is rather good in it – as she is rather good in everything else she appears in. Were another actress to have pulled off such a villainous feat, she might have been praised for being arch, knowing or saying something rather clever about the insanity beneath saccharine womanhood. But as usual they will be unable to see past the froth: Knightley isn’t playing flighty and annoying, they’ll claim, she is flighty and annoying; same old, same old. 

Why, then, this great metaphysical loathing? The actress herself answered the question when she revealed that strangers actually stop her in the street to inform her: “I hate your work” and “I hate your face”. They hate her because she’s beautiful, something we are happy to let George Clooney, Brad Pitt et al get away with, but is treated with suspicion when it comes in female guise.

Not only this, but Knightley is thin, rich, and pouting – the pout has a lot to do with it, a sort of self-conscious mouth acting that makes people perceive her as smug. Other actresses – Rosamund Pike, say, Jennifer Lawrence – wear their beauty with indifference. Keira’s pout seems to say: “I’m pretty and I know it” – something Brits, in particular, can never forgive her for. 

Time was when we idolised celluloid pulchritude as a beautiful blank slate upon which both genders could project their fantasies. Today, we suspect it, falling back on ancient prejudices that deem such loveliness deceptive, malevolent, a trap. 

For Keira is a star in the old-fashioned sense: dazzling, mesmerising, her beauty so blinding audiences can’t see beyond it. The camera is in love with the curious geometry of her face – all lightness, dark and angles; a Vivien Leigh countenance, Greta Garbo looks. Indeed, that’s the message of the scene in 2003’s Love Actually in which Andrew Lincoln’s Mark is revealed to have shot a wedding video solely of Knightley’s Juliet: beaming, picking her teeth, generally coruscating.

This raw-boned beauty is never more bewitching than as Cecilia Tallis, left bereft by the incarceration of her lover for rape in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007). The actress studied classics such as Brief Encounter in order to catch the studied insouciance of Thirties and Forties heroines, and, by God, she pulls it off: clipped, haughty, nervy as a racehorse. 

Look closely and our heroine is revealed as pear-shaped, breastless, with no discernible ankles, yet such is that angel’s face that no woman can match her. In emerald silk and Chanel diamonds, her loveliness is staggering, other-worldly. Indeed, Knightley’s rig-out was voted “Best Costume of All Time” in a poll by Sky Movies and In Style magazine, usurping Hepburn’s little black dress, Monroe’s white frock.

And, yet, it is possible to look beyond this beauty and behold the nuances she brings to her characters. Still a teenager, she fulfilled every girl’s fantasy by embodying Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005).

Despite the fact that there was eye-rolling when she was cast, it remains a wonderfully real-sized performance befitting Lizzie Bennet’s 20 years, rather than playing her as the sage and sophisticated society wit that other actresses tend to conjure. Knightley’s Elizabeth is naive and girlish, with a tendency to do a runner when the going gets tough. 

The realism of her performance also means that her love scenes with Matthew Macfadyen’s Darcy are genuinely hot, even though the pair were burdened by the worst wigs of all time. She deserved the many awards nominations her performance garnered, despite her wry observation at that year’s Bafta ceremony that she was clearly “only ever any good” in Joe Wright films.

This is nonsense: she is memorably affecting in Saul Dibb’s The Duchess (2008) and even acquits herself well in David Cronenberg’s otherwise dicey A Dangerous Method (2011). She makes consistently good choices both of film and fellow cast.

Her self-deprecation was most notably disproved by 2010’s clone body-farming drama Never Let Me Go, directed by Mark Romanek. In it, her portrayal of the unlikeable Ruth is lacerating, raw as a cut thumb – a terrible match for Carey Mulligan’s stoical Kathy and Andrew Garfield’s twitchy, animalistic Tommy. I defy even the most ardent Knightley-phobe not to look at her lifeless body on the operating table and weep.

Even here, Romanek had a problem with our heroine’s pulchritude, which required quashing, not least as her character staggers towards death. He observed: “It was difficult… Even at her worst, Keira looks astonishing.” As ever, Knightley’s beauty got in the way. Perhaps in the forthcoming Colette, in which she and fellow looker Dominic West hold their own in a way that transcends their mutual prettiness, we will finally be able to look past this beauty and see her as the actress she is.

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