Hollywood's former neurotic beauty turns 40 today

Keira Knightley is a perfect example of how, firstly, acting luck is fickle and, secondly, how much it can affect life outside the set.

After all, at first, the acting career of the future Hollywood star developed in such a way that other actresses could only envy - at 18, she played the main female role in the film "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl", and then starred in two more films of this franchise, which automatically made her a Hollywood star.

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And already at 20, she showed herself as an arthouse film actress and was nominated for an Oscar for the film adaptation of the classic English novel of the same name by Jane Austen "Pride and Prejudice".

But where some begin a brilliant career, Knightley began to have problems. At the age of 22, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which prevented her from working for a year, and she wanted to quit filmmaking and returned to it only thanks to the support of her family and close friends. And all because of her perfectionism, which developed into a mental illness.

By the way, such a master as David Cronenberg exploited Knightley's subtle (without quotes) nature by inviting her to star in his film "A Dangerous Method", which was based on the true story of the hysterical and masochistic Sabina Spielrein, who was a patient of the two main pillars of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Knightley was the perfect candidate here, since, apparently, Spielrein had her fragile nature - after all, Sabina turned from a patient into the lover of both professors. And Knightley played her so physiologically similarly that some film critics reproached her for being too natural.

Knightley's perfectionism was complicated by her dependence on the public's opinion (another professional acting disease). As Knightley said, when fans considered her too thin, she tried to gain weight. But then fans said that she had cellulite. The actress forced herself to lose weight and turned into an anorexic (perfectionists can never stop in the process of self-improvement) - but she was accused of driving imitators to death with her example.

In the end, growing up was good for the actress, she managed to overcome her mental problems and returned to work. And most importantly, she moved away from the roles of her standard characters, among which was also the standard figure of potentially successful, but unsure of themselves girls. Such as the talented singer singing in a New York bar in the 2013 film "Once in a Lifetime", who, thanks to a chance meeting with a music producer, releases her own album and at the same time finds love.

For example, in 2019, she created a completely opposite character in "Dangerous Secrets", based on real events - Katherine Gunn, an employee of the British Government Communications Headquarters, who passed information constituting a state secret to the newspaper The Observer in order to reveal the illegal grounds for starting the war in Iraq. The real Gunn, who liked Knightley's performance, did not hide even after the transfer of the data, but participated in anti-war demonstrations and took an equally active position in the trial against her - a trial that acquitted her.

Four years later, Knightley played journalist Loretta McLaughlin in The Boston Strangler, who, together with her colleague Jean Cole, fought against the sexism of the time (the action takes place in the 60s) and corruption, and helped to reveal the identity of the criminal. Incidentally, the "Boston Strangler" is a real figure.

Today, Knightley does not have as many roles as before, and she mainly acts in TV series, but her heroines are no longer an insecure young singer from a New York bar or a hysterical woman from decadent times, but a stable adult woman in all respects, which, one must assume, Knightley has become in real life.

Photo: Facebook