Talent isn’t the only thing that defines British actress Keira Knightley as ambition can also be an equally important characteristic that should be attributed to the ‘A Dangerous Method’ actress as she recently admitted to GQ UK Magazine that she has battled dyslexia from an early age. She was diagnosed with the learning disability at the age of six, but managed to overcome the problem in time. The talented actress was not discouraged about pursuing her dream and overcame her problem through reading ‘Sense and Sensibility’, an Emma Thompson screenplay written after Jane Austen’s British romance novel.
Her love for Emma Thompson’s work and the support of her mother in combination with her determination to become an actress helped Keira overcome her dyslexia. She told GQ UK in an exclusive interview for the magazine’s March 2020 issue that:
“My mum who worked with her [Thompson] on Sense and Sensibility got me a copy of the screenplay Emma had written. And I was – am – dyslexic and the way she got me over it was to say: ‘If Emma Thompson couldn’t read, she’d make sure she’d get over it, so you have to start reading, because that’s what Emma Thompson would do’.”
As far as her career goes, Ms. Knightley reveals that she nearly said no to her latest role as Sabina Spielrein in the “A Dangerous Method” movie, as she believed the role would involve certain provocative scenes that she wouldn’t be comfortable doing, but quickly changed her mind after telling to the director. She said:
“I said, I love you, I love the script. But I don’t think it’s something I can do, so I might have to turn it down. Once he said he didn’t want it to be sexy or voyeuristic, and as soon as I got my head around the S&M mentality, I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it’.”
To get into her character Keira revealed that she had to do some research and read the work of Jung and Sigmund Freud. Because the movie is based on a love affair story between a psychiatrist and one of his patients, Keira wanted to have a more profound knowledge of the psychological aspects that surround her character’s ilness. She told GQ that: “I vaguely knew it was about sex and blaming your parents. Apart from that I had no idea, so I had to do quite a lot of research to understand what they were talking about and understand where [Sabina] was coming from and the nature of the illness that she had.”
The amazing talent and stunning beauty of Keira helped her conquer the hearts of people around the world including those of her own country and America. As far as how she is perceived by people in the two countries, both Americans and British, Keira Knightly shares with the magazine that:
“The Americans are generally a lot more supportive. They generally like the work a lot more than they do here. It is what it is, I suppose. It could just be that I’m not to a lot of people’s tastes. Which is fine. Well it’s not, obviously. You want to be to everyone’s taste… But. I think it’s better to do your own thing rather than try to please everyone and just be this mushy thing in the middle..Sometimes it’s like water off a duck’s back, and sometimes it really hurts… and then you go away and cry for an hour or so, and then pick yourself up again…”
Find out more about Keira and check out her stunning spread in the March issue of GQ UK.
