Articles Archive

[Ranman]

You're doing a great job Leonie
If I wasn't such a lazy cretin
I would help you

[kingdumbass]

Anyone notice how she hasn't done any new photoshoots to go with this latest round of Pirates publicity?
Even that Elle mag just had recycled old pics.

[Leonie]

I suppose we can't blame her, with the scrutiny of every part of her body she's faced. She might just lay off them until she feels a bit more secure again. That said, I think the GQ had a fairly recent photo, judging by her hair.

[Leonie]

From Vogue.com

"Well, there you go. I've done my homework!" says actress Keira Knightley, handing over a leather-bound Louis Vuitton journal. Inside are pages and pages of immaculate, copperplate handwriting. Keira has taken her recent Vogue assignment—writing a diary of her escape to Africa—very seriously. "I got my flatmate to check all the spelling," she adds.

In person, the Pirates of the Caribbean star exudes the peculiar charm of a slightly scatty but ravishingly pretty British schoolgirl. Just back from her African safari, she tumbles into London's Soho Hotel on a cool spring afternoon. An oversize bag is falling off one spidery arm, and a huge knitted coat is bunched up under the other. Her mahogany tresses trail from a messy ponytail, and her black chiffon minidress is a little askew. She is scruffily glamorous, in the vein of the classic English rose at 22.

We are more used to seeing Keira Knightley swashbuckling her way through tropical islands in her role as the feisty Elizabeth Swann than romping in the Kenyan bush. (The third film in the franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, hits multiplexes this month.) But she took to the role of Vogue's African princess with equal spirit. I open Keira's diary and read a few sentences: "Masai Mara is wide, green, and beautiful. We're right on the border with Tanzania, and the sun is shining. Cottar's 1920s Safari Camp is like something out of a fairy tale. Totally in the wild. White tents, huge four-poster beds with draped white mosquito nets. All the furniture is like something from Out of Africa."

Curling her gangly legs beneath her in the armchair, Keira sips at a cup of English breakfast tea while she recounts her adventures. Located in the southeast of the Masai Mara, bordering the Serengeti and Loliondo reserves, the safari is owned and run by Calvin Cottar, whose family settled in East Africa in the early 1900s after hearing about Teddy Roosevelt's adventures there. Dressed in regulation khaki, Cottar is described as a Liam Neeson type who leaves female clients swooning when he leads the game drives and presides over his old-style camp. Guests are housed in huge white tents furnished with colonial antiques, Persian rugs, and eccentric bric-a-brac. There are even several small Julian Schnabel paintings of the camp's staff that the artist gave to Cottar after staying there.

On her first day, Cottar took Keira on an early-morning game drive. (They were also accompanied by Keira's current boyfriend. In true movie-star style, she refers to him in code, as "Passepartout" in her diary and "my traveling companion" when she talks about him. She never uses his name, although regular readers of supermarket tabloids will know he is the actor Rupert Friend.) Out on the Mara the group observed a herd of elephants and "four lion cubs in a tree. I mean, it was unbelievable…. These cubs were just flopped over these trees," says Keira. She puts down her teacup for a moment and splays her hands and legs in a cute impression of a baby lion.

During the day, Keira wrote her diary and read. She started The Day of the Triffids, The Human Zoo, and Othello. She didn't finish any of them. As the week went on, there were picnics in rainstorms and Masai tribesmen dancing by firelight. Keira sunbathed and slept, and in between obligingly posed for photographs. In the evenings, everyone in the camp ate dinner together at a long wooden table in the main tent. "The meals were very English, actually. We had prawn cocktails, lamb, and roly-poly pudding," she says.

After three days of playing dress-up, Keira scribbled in her diary, "I didn't think it would happen but it has. I'm in love with a white-and-cream Marc Jacobs dress. Oh, the pain of true love." As an actress whose looks and frame lend themselves to period costume, Keira was understandably drawn to the most historically inspired, feminine clothes on the shoot. She adored wearing the Louis Vuitton corset-style bathing suit, the gigantic silk ball skirt by Thakoon, and the 1930s-style rose-print sundress by Comme des Garçons. But the pièce de résistance was the white ruffled Peter Som gown, which exuded the romance of colonial chic.

In her other life as a movie star, Keira falls for the fashion as much as the roles. For the upcoming Atonement, in which she plays the heroine, Cecilia Tallis, Keira wore "absolutely incredible clothes. The beautiful thirties ones were actually made for me." From the novel by Ian McEwan, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, the film features a cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave and James McAvoy. You get the sense from Keira that this movie, filmed last summer in a grand, stately home in Shropshire, England, is her work crush of the year. "I loved it," she says. "It's very bleak…it's beautiful."

After lunch at the Giraffe Manor, a hotel near Nairobi where giraffes roam the grounds, Keira donned a chic gray Bottega Veneta frock to visit the baby elephants at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Mbagathi, the only successful project in the world at rehabilitating orphaned elephants into the wild. Her diary entry for that day reads, "Today everyone tried to catch the baby elephants so we could put Louis Vuitton blankets on their backs. I've never seen anything more brilliantly stupid. I hope Louis Vuitton like it; they should definitely give the elephant a modeling contract."

When it comes to traveling for fun, Keira has barely had time to go on vacation since she was sixteen. In fact, there have been precisely two holidays—aside from that, she's been working continually. Home in London for only a few weeks, Keira next heads off to Wales to film The Best Time of Our Lives with Sienna Miller. The movie, about Dylan Thomas's women, was written by Keira's mother, Sharman Macdonald. With so much location-hopping, it's not surprising that Keira craves home most of all. Her English life is simple: shopping at Borough Market and learning to cook from her flatmates—her brother, Caleb, and his girlfriend, fashion designer Kerry Nixon of the menswear label Vidler + Nixon. But mainly when she's home, she relaxes by being unavailable. Her mobile phone "doesn't really get answered a lot. I don't like talking on the phone, which is a nightmare because my mum does." Her BlackBerry had a short life. "I chucked it in the sea when I was working in the Bahamas doing Pirates, so it's in the ocean there somewhere." With a pang of guilt about the environment, she then adds, "I didn't mean to. Actually, no, I did mean to…. I did actually go back and try and find it, but I was in a fit of 'I don't want to be contacted. Leave me alone.' "

"The Chronicles of Keira" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the June 2007 issue of Vogue.

[kingdumbass]

For someone who recently complained about too much publicity, she sure....
Eh, fuck it.

And just to be an even BIGGER annoying stick in the mud -- how many actual starving Africans could have been fed with the amount of money spent on this article and its corresponsing photoshoot? Why not just take some polaroids, and then donate the rest of the photoshoot cost to a worthy charity?

I've always wondered that.

[seventhson]

See what I posted (or don't, wouldn't blame you) in Photo Sightings by mistake. My bad: Been away too long & posted in the wrong area.
Forgive me?

[devine kk]

Check out this link, keira made it as the face of the suns pit girl

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2007290517,00.html

[Leonie]

Behind the scenes of Keira's Chanel ad:

http://www.allocine.co.uk/article/fi...=18404088.html

(thankyou Paul)

[mongoose]

This is new. I haven't seen Keira in any ads yet. But there is a start for everything.

[Leonie]

CIAO BELLA!

Keira Knightley, who admits that there's more than just good genes behind her model looks, arrives in style at the 64th annual Venice Film Festival Tuesday. The actress is on hand to promote her new film Atonement, which will open the event on August 29.

(from: http://www.people.com/people/gallery...641_14,00.html)

[Leonie]

Sometimes I really love that girl:

KEIRA Knightley would never leave the house without her underwear, admitting being a celebrity isn't easy, but is no excuse to be caught going 'commando' in public. Keira told Empire magazine: "The whole celebrity thing is not magic. They are just real people proving they are sluttier than everybody else because they don't wear any knickers."

The 22-year-old actress continued her swipe at young female celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan by slamming stars who are photographed drunkenly staggering out of nightclubs. Keira said: "I'm not going to get blind drunk and then stumble out of a club and fall over and vomit in front of people. I'm not saying I don't do that in private, but I try not to."

From: http://www.news.com.au/entertainment...025337,00.html

What's this "talking to Empire" business, by the way? Interesting.

[hasselbrad]

The whole celebrity thing is not magic. They are just real people proving they are sluttier than everybody else because they don't wear any knickers.

Oh, and did you happen to notice further down the page that Li Lo was caught with drugs...in rehab?

[Leonie]

FESTIVAL QUEEN
Though she kicked off her shoes on the red carpet, Keira Knightley still sparkles like fairytale royalty in Chanel haute couture as she opens the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday with the premiere of her wartime romance, Atonement.

I love that she still just takes her shoes off if her feet are sore. She's starting to sound like the down-to-earth Keira from a few years ago again.

[Mandy]

Coming up in the new Allure issue:

“I absolutely hate red carpet events. I don’t like the fact that people write ‘Oh you look like crap’ [afterwards] or ‘I don’t like your arms’. I’m not Wonder Woman! I have self-esteem issues. Everybody does. You know, skinny people are allowed to feel shit about themselves [too].”

- Keira Knightley tells the new issue of Allure

Awww, that seriously makes me feel bad for ever criticising her. *hugs Keira*

[Mandy]

The new article from Allure is now here:

http://www.keiraknightley.com/media/....php?album=187

[Leonie]

This isn't so much Keira, but about Keira. It made me laugh anyway.

From today's Metro:

[Samantha Morton says,] "I want to prove you don't have to come from Oxford University or Rada, or have to have parents to support you to succeed." So, does she consider herself the anti-Keira? "I'm an actor, I'm not a celebrity," she snaps, once again twitching from chummy to snippy as her everpresent publicist looms warningly.
Perhaps it's a raw nerve. Reports have it that Morton was turned down for a role in Love Actually in favour of Miss Knightley, and another in Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm because she wasn't pretty enough for the moneyman.

Hee. Bitter much?

[Hazzle]

Elle! I was worried you'd fallen off the face of the planet. Loving the new avvy btw.

[Leonie]

I am rather internetless, busy, and scared to leave my house cause I live in a really, REALLY bad neighbourhood, but am otherwise fine (currently abusing uni internet). How bad, you ask? Well, the guy two doors down is a drugs dealer, there was a police raid in the next street last week, and on Friday, a guy was killed in front of my local supermarket. It's grand.

And I keep stumbling across Keira bits in the papers here, so I thought I'd climb back onto the surface of the earth :P

[Porcelain_Doll]

jesus and moses, Elle! All of that in England? What're you Brits doing to her?

Ok, seriously now. *intercontinental cyber hug*

[Leonie]

Wanna look like Keira? Or rather, Cecilia? Have a look at the Sun's feature on her 30s looks in Atonement here.