Keira, Actually The Aftermath Of Her Fame

The Actress No Longer Feels Like an Imposter

- Des Sampson

Keira Knightley may seem as though she has it all – Hollywood success, a rock star husband and a gorgeous toddler daughter, Edie. But, she confesses to the Weekly, the fame she attained so early on with movies such as Bend it Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean came at a price.

“That early part of my career was certainly quite a harsh experience, in many different ways,” she recalls, sighing. “It was a tricky time for me, as it is for many women at the end of their teens/beginning of their 20s, but it was amplified because of how famous I was.

“I’d turn up to the opening of a charity, wearing a nice dress and be perfectly smiley, and people would despise me for it,” she explains. “Then I’d wear the same dress, at another event, not say anything and people really appreciated it!

“It’s only as I got older that I realised you can only be yourself and people will either like you or they won’t because, ultimately, it’s impossible to appeal to everybody.”

Keira admits that part of the reason she worried about how people viewed her was because she felt like an imposter. That’s because she’d been plucked from bit parts on TV to play Natalie Portman’s decoy in Star Wars: Episode 1 − The Phantom Menace when she was just 12, before being quickly propelled to stardom at 17 with Bend It Like Beckham.

“I’ve never had an acting class and I never went to drama school,” reveals Keira, blushing.

“My plan had been to go to drama school, but suddenly I got all these jobs, so I never did. It did make me feel very insecure because I didn’t know what I was doing a lot of the time. I was just going on my instinct! Sometimes I knew I was good and sometimes I knew I was bad, but I had no idea why.”