Hollywood Artist

Date of Birth

26 March 1976, Topanga Canyon, California, USA

Birth Name

Amy Lysle Smart

Height

5' 6" (1.68 m)

Mini Biography

Amy was a relatively new arrival when she first gained notice for her supporting roles in the 1999 hit teen films Varsity Blues (1999) and Outside Providence (1999). With her blonde, carefree California girl good looks, the Los Angeles native got her start in TV-movies and made her feature debut in Stephen Kay's The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997) screened at 1997's Sundance Film Festival alongside Keanu Reeves. She was briefly seen in Paul Verhoeven's big-budget sci-fi actioner Starship Troopers (1997) with actor Casper Van Dien and had an impressive turn in the vastly different, quirkily independent How to Make the Cruelest Month (1998). In the latter, she played Dot, the graceful golden girl who seduces the one-time boyfriend of her sister, the troubled protagonist Bell (Clea DuVall). The by-the-numbers horror film Campfire Tales (1997) followed in 1997, along with the topically chilling but clumsily executed internet stalker thriller, Dee Snider's Strangeland (1998), written, produced and starring the titular Twisted Sister frontman as a deranged torturer who meets his victims in web chatrooms. Amy reached her widest audience with a co-starring role opposite James Van Der Beek in Brian Robbins' surprise box office hit "Varsity Blues (1999)". The actress played Jules Harbor, a girl who longs for life beyond her small town's high school football-obsessed culture but who, as sister of the injured star quarterback (Paul Walker) and girlfriend of his idealistic replacement (Van Der Beek), is tied to it. Her next role was that of Shawn Hatosy's upper-class love interest in Michael Corrente's poignant 1970s era comedy "Outside Providence (1999)". Based on Peter Farrelly's novel, the film followed a working-class teenaged boy (Hatosy) sent by his abrasive but loving father (Alec Baldwin) to a tony prep school after running into trouble at home.

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.