The daughter of actor Will Knightley and playwright Sharman Macdonald. After she requested an agent at the age of three, her parents allowed her to work on productions in her summer holidays. Her first role was at the age of 9, in Moira Armstrong`s A Village Affair (1995) (TV). However, Knightley`s first high profile role came in 1999, as Sabe, Decoy Queen to Natalie Portman`s Queen Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). Since then she has completed an impressive array of films including The Hole (2001), but is probably best known for her role of tomboy footballer Jules Paxton in Gurinder Chadha`s Bend It Like Beckham (2002).



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, 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 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 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) (mini), and travelled to Romania to film her first title role in Disney`s Princess of Thieves (2001) (TV) in which she played Robin Hood`s daughter Gwyn.

Keira`s first serious boyfriend was her Thieves 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 As) she filmed a mov

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