Keira Knightley: why I'll be fitting in film roles around the school holidays

Balancing a busy career with bringing up a young child is a challenge familiar to many parents. Keira Knightley is no different and has revealed that she will be planning future film roles around her daughter’s school calendar.

The Oscar-nominated star of Pride and Prejudice and The Imitation Game is mother to a three-year-old daughter, Edie, who will begin school next year.

During a career retrospective at Bafta in London, Knightley explained how parenthood has shifted her priorities.

“Where it’s filmed is going to have a big impact,” she said of future job offers. “So I’ve had to let something go next year that I really wanted to do but it was in a place that I couldn’t take her to, that didn’t have the facilities that I would have needed.

“Suddenly, it’s, ‘No, I can’t take her to the middle of nowhere.’ And also the timeframes I can do it in - she goes to school in September, which means I’m going to be very much trying to find work around her summer holidays so that we’re not separated for too long.

“So that’s going to have implications on what sort of projects I can do.”

However, while many actors say they seek out roles in family films so their children can see them on screen, Knightley does not plan to follow suit. “There are enough kids’ films out. She doesn’t need to watch me in kids’ films,” she joked.

Knightley also plans to produce films in the next few years, to give herself more options. “The field is pretty crowded, realistically. And I think in order to survive, possibly I’ll have to take control of that,” she said.

The Bafta event looked back on a career that has spanned nearly 20 years, from Knightley’s Hollywood debut in Star Wars sequel The Phantom Menace to her current role in Colette, a biographical drama about the French author of Gigi.

The actress said a scene with Dame Judi Dench in the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice had been one of her most formative experiences. Dame Judi played Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the adaptation, which earned Knightley her first Oscar nomination.

“You know what she gave me? She forgot her lines,” Knightley recalled. “There’s a big scene in Pride and Prejudice where we have a big fight and she just couldn’t remember it and she was getting really frustrated.

“And as a 19-year-old it was one of the most amazing things to see, because it was the understanding that you can’t be perfect all the time. She’d just do it again and again and again but seeing that somebody might make mistakes, I think that was one of the most important lessons. To go, ‘Oh, actually, mistakes are fine.’”

Knightley also touched on the breakdown she suffered at 21 after roles in Bend It Like Beckham, Pirates of the Caribbean and Atonement turned her into a world-famous star and brought negative media attention.

“I had these films that were doing brilliantly and yet I was also seen as being s---. I was getting modelling contracts and being told, ‘You’re beautiful,’ but at the same time I’ve got major papers saying, ‘Actually, her body should come with a health warning because she’s sick and she’s anorexic.’

“If you are the A* student and you’ve been taught that you’ve got to be perfect, all you want to do is please people. But you can’t be thinner and fatter at the same time.”

Last week, Knightley accepted her OBE from the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace and was so nervous that “he asked me what film I was working on now and I forgot”.