Keira Knightley Theatre Icon

After making a compelling Broadway debut, while bringing up her baby daughter, the actress has had a year full of drama.

- Elizabeth Day

Keira Knightley And I ...... are sitting in a cafe talking about our Uber ratings. When you order an Uber cab, the driver gives you a score out of five stars at the end of a journey. The lower the rating, the less likely you are to get picked up. “How do you find out your rating?” Knightley asks, midway through her croissant and a cup of English breakfast tea. You can follow a link on the app, I say. She visibly shudders. “I don’t want it,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to know.” I tell her that the last time I checked, mine was lower than I thought in spite of the fact that I am always scrupulously polite. I think, I say, it’s because... “You don’t chat?” Exactly. “No, I don’t talk,”agrees Knightley. “So I must have a shit Uber rating.” She pauses. “I think I am OK with that.”

You can understand why Keira Knightley is 31. For half of her life, she has been in the public eye. She had an agent at the age of six and won her breakout leading role in Bend It Like Beckham at 16. Since then, she has become one of the most famous women on the planet.

Her film career has been varied and stellar, running the gamut of genres. She has starred in period drama (Pride & Prejudice), action (Domino), independent films (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World), rom-coms (Love Actually), big-budget blockbusters (Pirates of the Caribbean) and high-brow literary adaptations (Atonement). She is about to appear alongside Will Smith and Helen Mirren in Collateral Beauty, the story of an advertising executive whose colleagues devise a plan to help him through the aftermath of a personal tragedy.