Keira Knightley names “the most extraordinary” performance she’s ever seen
It would have been easy for Keira Knightley to capitalise on the mainstream fame that greeted her from a very young age and set her sights on becoming a bankable A-list superstar, but that was never the reason she got into acting.
Not that it took her long to become a household name, though, with the star-making trio of Bend It Like Beckham, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and Love Actually releasing within nine months of each other in the United States, all before she’d even turned 19 years old.
Two years later, she was an Academy Award nominee, with her performance in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice underlining that she was a massively talented dramatic performer outside of her commercially successful endeavours that didn’t require those muscles to be stretched to an exhausting degree.
Knightley always saw herself as an actor and not a movie star, however, which is why she’s largely stayed away from blockbuster cinema since the original Pirates trilogy ended almost two decades ago. When she has returned, the results have generally been shite as Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms can attest, so it was definitely the right call.
Instead, Knightley has focused on smaller and more character-driven projects that provide material she can really sink her teeth into, which are also the movies she prefers as a viewer. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying expensive escapism, but even the folks who’ve starred in CGI-heavy spectacles aren’t above admitting it’s not their cup of tea.
One of Knightley’s peers from the other side of the Channel experienced almost the opposite type of rise, becoming an international superstar on the back of a single performance. Whereas the English actor skipped the local independent scene entirely to become a Hollywood fixture, Marion Cotillard was relatively unknown outside her native France despite working solidly for over a decade before the world sat up and took notice.
The sum of her overseas filmography before she won an Academy Award in 2008 was Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Abel Ferrara’s Mary, and Ridley Scott’s A Good Year. After embodying Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose and becoming only the second French ‘Best Actress’ winner ever, the third French woman to win an acting Oscar, and the first to win the trophy for a non-English performance in over 45 years, she almost immediately became a fixture of American cinema.
Knightley called her transformative work “one of the most extraordinary performances I’ve ever seen” in an interview with Pop Entertainment, and it was undoubtedly a career-maker for Cotillard. The former knows that it often takes little more than a single performance to pique Hollywood’s interest, and with the greatest of respect, the latter’s Piaf obviously blows Bend It Like Beckham‘s Jules out of the water.
