Keira's Quest

• Share

(2 of 3)

That may elicit groans from the stadium seats, but it probably gets sustained applause in the Knightley household. Knightley portrays her parents--playwright Sharman Macdonald and stage actor Will Knightley--as the noblest and humblest of theater folks. One of her favorite stories about how they suffered for their art has to do with her conception: "I was a bet. My mum was desperate for another child, and my dad told her that the only way they could afford to have one was if she sold a play. So Mum wrote When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout"--which had an eight-year run on London's West End--"and they got me."

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."