Keira Knightley recently reunited with Pride & Prejudice co-star Rosamund Pike for a Vanity Fair story commemorating the film’s 20th anniversary. Reflecting on that moment in her early career, Knightley revealed how difficult and emotionally confusing it was for her as a young actress managing popularity, criticism, and unexpected success.
Though Pirates of the Caribbean had already given her a household celebrity, Knightley said the business did not embrace her with open arms.
“But I had such huge success with Pirates. And I believe it was the first one that was both a great hit and highly lauded. So I believe it was released the same year or around the same time as Pirates 2.
And I had the worst reviews ever for it, while simultaneously being nominated for an Oscar.
Knightley was just 20 years old when she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her depiction of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, making her the third youngest candidate in that category at the time.
While the nomination was a significant achievement, it came in the midst of a flood of bad publicity that had already influenced her perception of her work, including earlier hit pictures.
When asked about the critiques for Bend It Like Beckham, she said, “I received awful reviews for it—or at least the ones I remember, or the ones that, in your 17-year-old brain, truly sink in.
In a previous interview with The Times of London, Knightley stated that the Pirates franchise’s popularity was both a blessing and a responsibility.
“It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” she told me. “I was seen as shit because of them, and yet because they did so well I was given the opportunity to do the films that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for,” she told me.
“They were the most successful pictures I’ve ever worked on, and they were the reason I was publicly fired. So they’re in a pretty muddled state in my mind.”
