Keira's Quest

(2 of 2)

Mom and Pop are not quite so humble in real life as they are in their daughter's mythology, but as Knightley watched her parents and her elder brother Caleb struggle through the uncertainty of life in the theater, she picked up a few critical lessons. First is the old adage that work is work, meaning that every job is a cause for celebration. "That's why my five-year plan is to take every job I can," Knightley says. "I know for a fact the work is going to dry up, and people will get bored of me. That's not bitterness, just the truth." The second lesson is that acting matters. "There was a sense that my parents' work was important and that it could change the world in a way," Knightley says. "That's an amazing thing to be around. It's inspiring. It makes you want to be great."

And she has wanted to be a part of that greatness from the time she was a toddler. Knightley was only 3 when she announced that she wanted an agent. Her parents persuaded her to wait a bit. But when their daughter's desire resurfaced a few years later, they reluctantly allowed her to act in television and commercials but not onstage, fearing that evening curtains would ruin her schoolwork. They also refused to give her a lick of formal training. Other than a recent Christmas gift from her father — a book on acting for the stage — her parents have been steadfast in their conviction that she should find her own way.

The result is that Knightley has the ethic of an artist and the unaffected energy of an autodidact. "Sometimes I put my head into a character's head and go really simplistically and think, like, What's the character's favorite color?" she says of her attempts at technique. "But I don't see how that helps so much." She has also tried listening to loops of Jeff Buckley and Nirvana to get into the right frame of mind to play an alcoholic Vermont waitress, opposite Adrien Brody, in the recently completed independent film The Jacket. "Oooh! I tried a bit of Method for that as well," she says in elaborate self-mockery. "The character was meant to be a bit of an insomniac, so I tried to not sleep, though it didn't really work. I thought about staying awake so much that it sent me to sleep. I don't have it down to a science yet."

What she does have is an obvious screen presence and an ambition beyond fame. "Nobody ever believes me when I say it, but that was never one of the reasons I wanted to act," says Knightley. "That's not what my mom and dad are, and my knowledge of the business wasn't anything to do with that." She recognizes that movie star is "a pretty good job," and she may yet sign on to that Pirates sequel. But asked if she's holding out because she would rather do something deeply obscure and conspicuously artistic, like, say, repertory theater in the British Midlands, she says, quite seriously, "You know, I might like that, actually. Could be quite fun."