Thursday, January 26, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Keira Knightley Biography 2012
Profile
Birth Date:March 22, 1983
Birth Place:Teddington, London, England, UK
Height:5' 7"
Sex:Female
Nationality:British
Profession:Actress
Relationship:Rupert Friend (actor; began dating on January 2006), Kaz James (Aussie DJ), Jamie Dornan (Irish model; broke up in 2005)
Father:Will Knightley (actor; born on April 23, 1946)
Mother:Sharman Macdonald (writer; born in 1951)
Brother:Caleb Knightley (born in 1979)
Claim to fame:Soccer-playing tomboy Juliette Paxton in Bend it Like Beckham (2003)
Keira Christina Knightley was born in the South London suburb of Richmond on March 26th 1985. She is the daughter of actor Will Knightley and actress turned playwright Sharman Macdonald. An older brother, Caleb Knightley, was born in 1979. Brought up immersed in the acting profession from both sides - writing and performing - it is little wonder that the young Keira asked for her own agent at the age of three. She was granted one at the age of six and performed in her first TV role as "Little Girl" in "Screen One: Royal Celebration (#5.4)" (1993), aged seven. It was discovered at an early age that Keira had severe difficulties in reading and writing. She was not officially dyslexic as she never sat the formal tests required of the British Dyslexia Association. Instead, she worked incredibly hard, encouraged by her family, until the problem had been overcome by her early teens.
Her first multi-scene performance came in A Village Affair (1995) (TV), an adaptation of the lesbian love story by Joanna Trollope. This was followed by small parts in the British crime series "The Bill" (1984), an exiled German princess in The Treasure Seekers (1996) (TV) and a much more substantial role as the young "Judith Dunbar" in Giles Foster's adaptation of Rosamunde Pilcher's novel Coming Home (1998) (TV), alongside Peter O'Toole, Penelope Keith and Joanna Lumley. The first time Keira's name was mentioned around the world was when it was revealed (in a plot twist kept secret by director George Lucas) that she played Natalie Portman's decoy "Padme" to Portman's "Amidala" in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999).
It was several years before agreement was reached over which scenes featured Keira as the queen and which featured Natalie! Keira had no formal training as an actress and did it out of pure enjoyment. She went to an ordinary council-run school in nearby Teddington and had no idea what she wanted to do when she left. By now, she was beginning to receive far more substantial roles and was starting to turn work down as one project and her schoolwork was enough to contend with. She reappeared on British television in 1999 as "Rose Fleming" in Alan Bleasdale's faithful reworking of Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" (1999), and travelled to Romania to film her first title role in Walt Disney's Princess of Thieves (2001) (TV) in which she played Robin Hood's daughter, Gwyn. Keira's first serious boyfriend was her Princess of Thieves (2001) (TV) co-star Del Synnott, and they later co-starred in Peter Hewitt's 'work of fart' Thunderpants (2002). Nick Hamm's dark thriller The Hole (2001) kept her busy during 2000, and featured her first nude scene (15 at the time, the film was not released until she was 16 years old).
In the summer of 2001, while Keira studied and sat her final school exams (she received six A's), she filmed a movie about an Asian girl's (Parminder Nagra) love for football and the prejudices she has to overcome regarding both her culture and her religion). Bend It Like Beckham (2002) was a smash hit in football-mad Britain but it had to wait until another of Keira's films propelled it to the top end of the US box office. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) cost just £3.5m to make, and nearly £1m of that came from the British Lottery. It took £11m in the UK and has since gone on to score more than US$76m worldwide. Meanwhile, Keira had started A-levels at Esher College, studying Classics, English Literature and Political History, but continued to take acting roles which she thought would widen her experience as an actress. The story of a drug-addicted waitress and her friendship with the young son of a drug-addict, Pure (2002), occupied Keira from January to March 2002. Also at this time, Keira's first attempt at Shakespeare was filmed. She played "Helena" in a modern interpretation of a scene from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" entitled The Seasons Alter (2002). This was commissioned by the environmental organisation "Futerra", of which Keira's mother is patron. Keira received no fee for this performance or for another short film, New Year's Eve (2002), by award-winning director Col Spector.
But it was a chance encounter with producer Andy Harries at the London premiere of Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) which forced Keira to leave her studies and pursue acting full-time. The meeting lead to an audition for the role of "Larisa Feodorovna Guishar" - the classic heroine of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (2002) (TV), played famously in the David Lean movie by Julie Christie. This was to be a big-budget TV movie with a screenplay written by Andrew Davies. Keira won the part and the mini-series was filmed throughout the Spring of 2002 in Slovakia, co-starring Sam Neill and Hans Matheson as "Yuri Zhivago". Keira rounded off 2002 with a few scenes in the first movie to be directed by Blackadder and Vicar of Dibley writer Richard Curtis. Called Love Actually (2003), Keira played "Juliet", a newlywed whose husband's Best Man is secretly besotted with her.
Natalie Portman Biography 2012
Child stars in general have a dreadful time growing up. Cast primarily for their looks (or their connections), the onset of acne ordinarily proves fatal. No longer cute, they are nothing, fit only to be cast into the bottomless dustbin of history. But sometimes child stars have something else to them. Not simply precociousness, but a sense that they are far older than their years. Jodie Foster had it. Haley Joel Osment had it, so did Christina Ricci. Jennifer Connelly had it, too, though she had to wait 20 years for everyone to recognise it. And, of course, there's Natalie Portman, who began her career in two of the hardest-hitting films of the mid-Nineties (Leon and Heat), then acquitted herself well in comedy, ensemble pieces and high drama before starring as the regal love interest in George Lucas's 3-part prequel to the Star Wars trilogy. An extraordinary growth pattern, and all the more so because she also found time to undergo a high class academic education. No fool, her.
Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem on the 9th of June, 1981. Her grandfather had been a Polish Jew and socialist who, when young, had organised special camps to teach agriculture to young men moving to Israel - the first kibbutzim. Her name was not Portman, it was Hershlag. When debuting onscreen, Natalie wisely took her grandmother's name to avoid any interference in her schooling and private life. Her father, Avner, was a doctor, specialising in fertility. Throughout Natalie's youth, he would return from work and announce how many women he had made pregnant that day. At age 8, Natalie would be reprimanded for repeating his stories at school. Her mother, Shelley, from Ohio, was an artist, and later Natalie's agent. Coincidentally, Shelley was conceived on Natalie's dad's birthday, as was Natalie herself.
The family lived in Jerusalem till Natalie was 3, then moved to Washington for four years. Then came two years in Connecticut, before they settled on Long Island, where she'd attend Syosset High School. By this time, Natalie was well on her way toward a career in entertainment. She'd been dancing since the age of 4 but was really taken when she saw Dirty Dancing. Now she began to really perform, arranging pillows in rows in the family basement and charging adults 10 cents a throw to watch her. For an all-round education, her parents would take her to the theatre, to galleries and to many foreign lands. Her later co-star Susan Sarandon would describe Natalie's home-life as "a rarefied atmosphere", and she was absolutely correct.
A vegetarian since the age of 8 (she switched when she attended a medical conference with her father and witnessed laser surgery on a chicken), she also turned early to acting.
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