凯拉·奈特莉

Dirty pretty thing
She wanted an agent at three, got one at six and was on telly by the age of 10. Now, as she takes on the role of Princess Diana's ancestor, she is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Just don't ask her how much she earns... Sam Wollaston spars with Keira Knightley

* Sam Wollaston
* The Guardian,
* Saturday August 30 2008

Maybe it's because we normally see her in pretty dresses and bonnets, speaking so exquisitely crisply, that it feels strange, paradoxical even, to be sworn at by Keira Knightley. Like a spurt of Special Brew from a fine Wedgwood teapot. Can she really have just told me to fuck off? When all I asked was who she went on holiday with?

But it's not long before the next one. In the hour I'm in Knightley's company, she tells me to fuck off six times. She uses the c-word, too. Sorry, yes, this is an 18-rated interview and contains strong language from the start - a bit late for that, I know...

Knightley has a new film out, about which more later. We are sitting in a posh London hotel where she drinks green tea, and sits, like a cat, in the middle of an impossibly plumped-up sofa cushion. There is something quite feline about Knightley. When we talk about her work, she purrs. No, not literally - that would be weird - but she speaks easily, and appears content and relaxed. When I attempt to steer the conversation towards her life outside work, the claws come out. In a very good-natured, playful way, it has to be said. At times the interview feels like a sparring match, and she gives as good as she gets, if not better. She's very entertaining company, and it's fun - trying to get under the guard of Keira Knightley.

This will sound like the tragic fantasy of a male journalist who has fallen under the spell of a very pretty young lady and somehow imagines he could be her friend, but although she does speak awful proper, there is something nicely unstarry about her. Perhaps it's being sworn at, but I'm finding it hard to remember that I am talking to the second highest-paid actress in Hollywood last year, although there seems be some debate about exactly how much she made.

"According to Forbes magazine, I earned 32 million last year," she says, though she can't remember if it's dollars or pounds (it's dollars).

Is that not true? "Unfortunately, no."

How much did you earn? "Fuck off."

She says that money is not important beyond being comfortable, that she owns her own flat "somewhere in London", and she mentions a new sofa. When I ask how much the sofa was, I get the inevitable (and probably well-deserved) "fuck off".

She doesn't want to talk about politics much, because she doesn't feel confident talking about it, though when I ask what she votes, she says, "My dad was a founder member of a leftwing theatre company, I went to a comprehensive - what do you think?"

Her father is an actor, her mother is a playwright, and young Keira was brought up in Teddington, west London. How posh does that make her, I wonder. "People from the Guardian and Observer always want to know that, it's weird," she replies. "Why are you so obsessed with poshness? Somebody from the Observer asked me why I don't have a cockney accent, seeing as I went to a comprehensive school."

It seems a reasonable question, so what's the answer? "Not everyone who goes to comprehensive school has a cockney accent. I think I probably did have more of an estuary accent. Coming from Teddington, it's more estuary. Cockney is more east London."

Do an estuary accent then. "No."

American then. "No."

Can she do an Indian accent? "Not today, no. Fuck off."

But she's an actor. "You're an actor, so act [Oi, she's stealing my lines]. Give me a script then."

The new film is called The Duchess, and Knightley is excellent in the lead. It's about a late-18th century "It girl" called Georgiana Spencer, Di's great-great-great-great aunt. There are obvious parallels between their two lives, though Knightley wasn't immediately stuck by them, mainly because, as she says, she was only 11 when Diana died (she's 23 now).

Georgiana marries a cold fish played, also excellently, by Ralph Fiennes, who is really, really horrid to her. It gets more complicated when Georgiana's best friend, Bess, moves in, and they live as a joyless ménage à trois. Georgiana finds some solace in an affair with young politician Charles Grey, but has to stop seeing him in order not to lose contact with her children. It's a story of female repression, but also of female strength and survival. It's also a story about public adoration versus private misery (see what I mean about those parallels?).

Even though Knightley is too young for Diana to have made much of an impact on her life, the difference between a person's public facade and what's going on inside is something that seems to preoccupy her. "The way you can have extremely strong people who actually in private are completely breaking down. Everyone does it - presents a front that is actually... No one can ever know what's going on emotionally inside."

Is there anything of this, of Georgiana, in her? "Am I very lonely, and terribly trapped, and all the rest of it? No, I don't particularly look for characters that are like some kind of biography of myself, no."

It's a role she didn't find easy. "I wasn't particularly confident about it, which I think actually helped - because I don't think that confidence is always a very helpful thing. I really found it very difficult to get a grasp of her."

This lack of confidence is something that seems to lurk beneath the alabaster facade. When I ask if she thinks she'll win an Oscar for this role, as well as saying she doesn't think she will because it's what's known as a "big year" in the business, she also says, "I'd probably shit myself if I had to give a speech."

Is she often unconfident about her parts? "There's always an element of fear that you're not going to be able to make people believe in the fiction, that suddenly you're going to be standing there in your dress and wig, and feel like a complete wanker. Which is not particularly helpful."

It is not surprising that she mentions wigs and dresses, because a role for Knightley generally involves her putting on one, or both, of those. This has happened by accident rather than by design, she says. "I think I've simply read better characters in period pieces than I have in contemporary, which is a pity. I don't know why that is. But I haven't been kind of going, 'I really want to do another period film.' I've just been led by what scripts I've thought were good, and what film-makers I thought were good."

Knightley knew she wanted to act pretty much from the moment she knew anything at all. Famously, she wanted an agent at three, got one at six, and was making TV appearances by the age of 10. Her big breakthrough was the low-budget British film Bend It Like Beckham in 2002, after which she found herself alongside Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp in camp, big-budget action blockbuster Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl. Suddenly, the skinny little girl from Teddington was a major, if unlikely, Hollywood star.

While it may be the Pirates franchise that has brought in those millions (however many there are), Knightley is more serious about acting than to be happy simply being a damsel in distress. She's done the odd thriller and action film, which have slipped by comparatively unnoticed, but it's with country houses and the past that she is most associated - Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, now The Duchess. It's what Britain exports well, she says, and it isn't hard to find modern relevance under a bonnet. "I don't think we've really changed that much in our essence."

I'm wondering if that's it, and whether we've seen the full range yet. "Of?"

You. "As an actress? I hope not. It would be quite sad if I said yes. I've only been making films for the past five years. You change as a person all the time. And so therefore the way you perceive the world and situations, and the way you portray characters, is going to change. I think that's the aim."

Critics of Knightley say she is wooden and expressionless, though they've been less vociferous since Pride & Prejudice and Atonement. But the criticism is not just about her acting - she seems to generate more loathing, almost exclusively from women, than any actor deserves. I've brought along an example, a newspaper column (OK, it's from the Guardian). "Oh great," she says. "You're not actually going to quote me something really shitty that someone's said, are you?" Well, I wouldn't have, but she's been so totally cool, and unfazed, and also to show that I haven't fallen totally under the pretty-lady spell, so yes, I am...

"If you want to befriend a woman, ask her the question, 'What do you think of Keira Knightley?' In the resulting torrent of bile and loathing, you will bond."

"Well, I'm doing a good thing for women all over the country, then," she says. "I think that's a very positive thing."

Why do so many women hate you? "I don't know," she sighs. "Maybe you should ask the woman who wrote it. I think if you put yourself in the public forum, then that's what you put yourself up for, I guess. I don't think I need to read it. I have friends."

Who likes you? "I'm a shit person and no one likes me," she says. "I'm an absolute cunt."

It's quite shocking. Also very funny. Sarcasm is probably the best possible way to respond to what I've just read to her. Again, she wins the point. (And, to be fair, the columnist goes on to admit that Knightley can act. And the real reason that she - and a lot of others - hate her is that she is thin.)

"I think manipulation is something that women do a lot, it's still our number one problem," she says. "You look at those characters [in The Duchess] - Georgiana and Bess - and they're hugely trying to outmanoeuvre each other, but I think it's also possible for intense love affairs to happen between women - not necessarily sexual, but things can obviously take a sexual turn. Women do get obsessed with other women - whether they love them or hate them, and I think that line is very easy to cross."

The anorexia thing is perhaps the only one that does get Knightley's goat, in public, anyway (Lord knows what gets her private goat). Last year she sued the Daily Mail over suggestions that she'd lied about being anorexic. The paper ran a picture of her alongside a story about a girl who died of the disorder. "Someone saying you have a mental illness is obviously rather difficult to take, and particularly when they're blaming you for killing someone," she says. "I am skinny. I've always been skinny."

There is one "exia" she does admit to, however: dyslexia. She was slow to learn to read, got letters and numbers the wrong way round, and was diagnosed when she was six. Through support and tutors, and lots of help from her mum, she largely overcame it, and by the time she went to secondary school she didn't need extra help, or more time in exams or anything like that.

She admits she's still a crap speller, though. So I ask her to spell February. "You can't do that to somebody," she says (and it occurs to me that challenging someone who has just told you they are dyslexic to spell something is perhaps a bit wrong). But she spells it, correctly, though she makes the sounds of the letters rather than saying their names, much as a child would. Licence next. "Are we actually going to do a spelling test?" she asks, then puts her foot down. "I'm not going to."

She regrets not having been to university, has even said she would like to go some time. But that's not really going to happen, is it? It would be a bit hard, for a movie star, freshers' week and all that? "Right now, it would be hard, yes. I could do Open University." She's not sure what she'd study, though - for the time being, she's happy with what she's doing. And at the moment, she says, she's not doing much. There's a possibility of playing Cordelia in a new King Lear film, but she's not sure whether or not that will happen. For the time being she's unemployed.

What does it involve, being an unemployed movie star? What does she do? Well, yesterday she read a book - Emma's War, by Deborah Scroggins, about a woman who goes to Sudan and falls in love with a military reader there. And she watched a lot of The Wire. And in the evening she got an Indian takeaway - chicken tikka jalfrezi and dhingri mutter - peas and mushrooms. Mmmm. Washed down with a bottle of Cobra. While watching more of The Wire, which is "absolutely brilliant".

Alone, were you? "Fuck off," she says.

The Duchess is released next Friday.

原著作者谈《公爵夫人》

From The Sunday Times
August 24, 2008
How do you solve a problem like Georgiana?

Amanda Foreman

I did not know anything in my twenties. I don’t mean I was stupid or ignorant. I simply knew nothing of the world. My contemporaries were climbing the job ladder and buying houses. I, on the other hand, was reading about a tiny little area, within a small field, of a narrow aspect of 18th-century British history.

The area in question was the life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1757-1806, known in her lifetime as the Empress of Fashion and the doyenne of the Whig party. Until I began my research, my acquaintance with her had been limited to the few lines she garnered in general histories of the period. She had campaigned for the Whig party during the general election of 1784, allegedly trading kisses for votes; and, long before he became prime minister, Earl Grey was her lover.

Neither of those pieces of information had led me to believe she merited further investigation. In fact, I was already deep into a different dissertation when, by good fortune, I picked up a biography of Earl Grey that quoted several of her letters. I was smitten by the end of the first.

I devoted the next five years to her. Undistracted by a social life or the needs of a family, I simultaneously wrote a doctoral thesis and a commercial biography. The book, called Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, became an international bestseller, the subject of a docudrama for Channel 4, a radio play for Radio 4 starring Judi Dench, and, now, a film, The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley as Georgiana, and Ralph Fiennes as her husband, the 5th Duke of Devonshire.

Georgiana wrote to her correspondents as if she were speaking directly to them. She had, in contrast to every other human being I have ever encountered, no filter to her thoughts. When I say that I was smitten, I mean she captivated me to the point where my desire to release her voice into the present became an obsession. She dazzled and fascinated me. She seemed to be everything I wasn’t: a wife, a mother, a leader of society and a very public figure. Even her problems were more interesting than mine.

When I wrote about the 27-year-old Georgiana campaigning in the infamous 1784 election, I was exactly the same age. She had already been married for 10 years. She was fully formed — or, at least, I thought so — whereas I had come to her as raw and as unmade as it is possible for a biographer to be. Yet I knew at the time of writing that something profound connected us. I didn’t realise what it was, however, until 13 years later, when I watched Knightley during the filming of The Duchess. Then it struck me with the force of a blunt instrument. We had shared a set of assumptions — a framework of beliefs — that are the essence of youth. I maintained those beliefs while writing the book, even as Georgiana’s changed. Yet at the time, I was too young and inexperienced to notice. From start to finish, in my mind’s eye Georgiana was always the 27-year-old heroine fighting to be the agent of her own destiny. As I look at her now, I see someone quite different.

When Georgiana married the Duke of Devonshire at the age of 16, her sole desire was to please him and not to be an embarrassment in front of his friends. As the eldest daughter of the 1st Earl Spencer, she had been brought up to make a good match. But nothing in her education prepared Georgiana for her sudden fame. The duke’s vast wealth and political power as the financial patron of the Whig party placed Georgiana on a tall, lonely pedestal. In the beginning, every day brought new hurdles, and therefore new terrors, to be faced. However, by the end of Georgiana’s first year of married life, she had become the darling of 18th-century society. She combined an extraordinary talent for making people feel special with an uncanny ability to be the centre of attention.

Georgiana’s youth was a handicap at first, but, as the film cleverly shows, it protected her when she started to experiment with her clothes. Society likes fresh young talent with bold ideas. Georgiana was not only unafraid to challenge the rules of fashion, she relished the opportunity to exert her power. As Knightley’s Georgiana explains to Fiennes’s duke in the film: “You have so many ways of expressing yourself, whereas we must make do with our hats and dresses.” She turned each public entrance into a moment of drama. “When she appeared, every eye was turned towards her,” wrote the French ambassador — and a character declares in The Duchess: “When absent, she was the subject of universal conversation.”

Georgiana’s unprecedented social success was accompanied by untrammelled private excess. Gambling was all the rage in the late 18th century. For Georgiana, though, it was an addiction. She ran up debts so large that a true reckoning would have bankrupted the Devonshire estate several times over. She took drugs to block out her emotions. She binged and purged like a modern-day bulimic. At least some of her many miscarriages can be traced to her extraordinarily destructive lifestyle.

Addiction, as we now know, is a disease, but Georgiana might not have become a gambling addict if she had been married to a supportive husband or benefited from an understanding mother. Unfortunately, the duke was the only man in England who was unmoved by his wife. Shy and emotionally inarticulate, he ought to have married a self-confident, mature woman whose sole aim in life was to make him happy. Instead, he chose a needy adolescent whose clinginess repulsed him. Yet when she sought public adulation as a compensation, he felt wounded and bitter.

The Devonshires had been married for eight childless years when Lady Elizabeth Foster, “Bess”, descended upon them. Georgiana was at the height of her social prowess, having made her role as the premier Whig hostess into much more than a matter of political dinners and handshakes on election day. Yet the gnawing loneliness remained. “When I first came into the world, the novelty of the scene made me like everything,” she admitted to a friend. “However, now my heart feels only an emptiness in the beau monde which cannot be filled.”

The wily, calculating Bess, played by Hayley Atwell in The Duchess, came to the rescue. She did indeed love Georgiana. But it was the love of a celebrity-stalker. She wanted to be Georgiana and possess everything she had, including the duke. Within a short space of time, Bess turned the Devonshires’ marriage into a ménage à trois, with herself at the centre. She was the duke's mistress, Georgiana’s confidante and the social gatekeeper to Chatsworth. The arrival of two girls and a boy released Georgiana from her marital yoke, and from Bess to some extent. She took Charles Grey as her lover (the handsome Dominic Cooper in the film) and at last experienced the all-encompassing, romantic love that she had craved. The duke discovered the affair, however, after she became pregnant with Grey’s child. He banished Georgiana to the Continent for two years and forced her to relinquish the baby for adoption. Yet for all the damage Bess created and the lies she told, when forced to choose between Georgiana and the duke, she chose her friend. Bess supported Georgiana throughout her exile.

The film focuses on this period of Georgiana’s life. As a work of art rather than history, it makes sense because of the romantic intensity of the story. However, Georgiana lived for another 15 years. In fact, I treated her exile as one of several desperate moments in a narrative arc that began with her successful entry into fashionable society, veered off into a midlife descent into madness and exile, only to recover at the end with a triumphant return to public life.

I portrayed Georgiana as a brilliant, thwarted individual who used all available means to silence the voices in her head. To me, her exile was just another stop on the tortuous road to self-immolation. The nadir of her life, I believed, was in 1796, three years after her return. A mystery infection cost her the sight in one eye. The appalling treatment at the hands of 18th-century doctors cost Georgiana her looks. But it was also her redemption. Shorn of her last defence against the world, Georgiana entered a period of reflection and self-examination.

She re-entered society just when the Whig party was re-forming after two decades in the wilderness. Confident of her intellectual capabilities and no longer addicted to drugs or gambling, she resumed her political role. Georgiana died far too young, at 48. But it seemed to me as though her story had ended on the perfect note. She had proved George Eliot’s maxim that it is never too late to be what you might have been. Georgiana fitted the notions I had as a single woman in her twenties. Then, I assumed that no mistakes are permanent, and that we always have the freedom to remake ourselves. I believed that it is in our nature to strive towards some happy end point. That is how I wrote the narrative. I did not hide the sad times in Georgiana’s life, but they seemed insignificant beside her successes. Without doubt, this was the story that she would have preferred to be written, and I was so in thrall to her that I willingly went along with it.

What I had failed to do was look beyond her words to what she didn’t say; to look behind the pretty curtain. She couldn’t bear to do it herself, and I hadn’t experienced enough of life to know that she had erected a facade to protect her children from her pain. Ten years and five children later, if I were to write Georgiana today, I would give her a different narrative arc. I would acknowledge what the film succeeds in showing so elegantly — that the true heroine was not the politician or the fashion maven but the woman who wrote: “I have, in leaving Grey forever, left my heart and soul. He has one consolation, that I have given him up for my children only.”

There is no doubt in my mind, now, that the great tragedy of Georgiana’s life was her banishment from the children. This, not her illness, was the moment of truth. The duke essentially kidnapped her children in revenge for her love affair. His brutal assertion of male right forced Georgiana to redefine herself; from that moment, her life was no longer about possibilities but about consequences.

The casualties of her struggle for happiness were all around her: a child who would grow up thinking she was an orphan, an older daughter whose self-confidence would never recover, another daughter who treated her with suspicion for years, and a son who lost his hearing in her absence. Georgiana was a stranger to them when she returned, particularly to the younger ones. The overwhelming emotion she felt for the next decade was guilt.

Georgiana did undergo a personal redemption, and she did re-emerge into society on a triumphant wave of Whig politics. But underneath the patina of success were many, many layers of sadness. First and foremost, she had reached for freedom and been irrevocably harmed in the attempt. Like any modern woman, she had desperately wanted to feel fulfilled in all aspects of her life — as an ambitious individual, a woman who loved and was loved in return, and as a caring mother. She learnt in the most agonising way that the equation is impossible.

Shortly after Georgiana’s death, Harriet, her sister, wrote about “the latter miserable years of Georgiana’s life”. I still think that is an overly pessimistic judgment, borne on a wave of grief. But I see now that Georgiana’s pain never went away. Once she became a mother, her destiny, and her heart, belonged to the children. Everything she did after her exile was, for the most part, for them. It was a sacrifice she willingly made. Most mothers, including myself, would do the same. It is blindingly obvious to me now.

“Oh my beloved, my adored departed mother,” wrote her eldest daughter in the days after Georgiana’s death. “You whom I loved with such tenderness, you who were the best of mothers, adieu — I wanted to strew violets over her dying bed as she strewed sweets over my life, but they would not let me.”

© Amanda Foreman 20

The Duchess is released on September 5.

The Duchess by Amanda Foreman is published by Harper Perennial at £7.99. Sunday Times readers can obtain it from BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 for £7.59 (including p&p)