The Culture Blog
It’ll Be Alright On the Knightley
Laura Freeman went to see The Misanthrope, starring Keira Knightley – and guess what? She’s transformed herself from a pirate princess into that rarest of things: a real actress.
Keira Knightley (Jennifer) and Damian Lewis (Alceste) in The Misanthrope. Photo by Alastair Muir.
Keira Knightley and I, we go way back. We’re practically neighbours. Practically. She lives four streets away and, in truth, I don’t know which house, or for that matter which side of the road she lives on, but I did once see her in the newsagent which makes us neighbours near enough.
I’ve never sold my story to The Mirror. As celebrity sightings go it wasn’t very newsworthy. She bought a pint of milk and a copy of The Times. If she’d been buying cigarettes and Heineken it might have made more of a story. What was striking about this brief celebrity encounter was how utterly, jaw-droppingly beautiful Knightley is. Preternaturally, not-of-this-earth beautiful. She was a Venus risen from the waves of Lads Mags and shelves of Cadburys.
Knightley’s beauty has been both the great help and hindrance of her career. She is cast for her luminous, photogenic looks and the camera lingers so lovingly in close-up on her doe eyes and velvet pout that there is no room to act. No breathing space between the actress and the adoring lens. Witness her performance in King Arthur, pouting over a bow and arrow, or her turn in Pirates of the Caribbean, pouting into the horizon. In Atonement and The Duchess the pout was perhaps more nuanced with a greater dramatic range, but a pout is still a pout. Knightley would have been a great star of the silent screen.
Still, she is so mesmerizingly beautiful than you can simply gaze and gaze. Who cares if she can act? She’s a goddess.
This particular train of thought only really holds up on screen. On stage it’s another matter. No close ups, no rose-tinted beauty lamps and however hard you pout, the man in the back still won’t be able to see it.
Knightley is currently making her West End stage debut as Jennifer, an American movie star, in Molière’s The Misanthrope. It’s a brave move (though not necessarily a stretching part) for an actress who has been dogged by accusations of pulchritude over performance since she first bared her midriff in Bend It Like Beckham in 2002. So, what’s the verdict?
All things considered, she’s not half bad. Better than I’ve ever seen her. She’s spiteful and spoilt and self-obsessed. She veers from flirtatious and wheedling to a spitting, viperish bitchiness. All this time all she needed was to play a villain.
She’s not perfect. Her American accent occasionally lapses into classic Knightley pluminess and she still enters every scene jaw first, but she holds her own against the wonderfully petulant Damien Lewis as the eponymous misanthrope. And she’s funny. She got the biggest laugh of the night with her horrified rejection of Lewis’ offer of a quiet suburban life and a Japanese car.
She’s still beautiful. But from where I was, far out in the audience, too far for a close up, she was finally acting, not pouting.
Topics: Celebrities, Reviews, Theatre
why do i get feeling i seen u before..went to see play myself. not bad