Keira Knightley

Few actresses enjoy the kind of success Keira Knightley saw in 2003. First, her major picture starring debut, Pirates Of The Caribbean, entered the all-time Top 20 of box-office hits. Then, due to this success, her earlier low-budget effort, Bend It Like Beckham, already a cult smash, found its release widened dramatically, taking it into undreamed of profit. Following these with Love, Actually, the latest cute rom-com from Richard "Notting Hill" Curtis, her rise in a few short months would be nothing short of phenomenal. And still she was only 18.

Yet, despite her tender years, Keira Knightley already had a fair amount of working experience. Like such American actresses as Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles, she had begun her career at an absurdly young age. Unlike them, though, she had not done so through the actions of "pushy" parents. Knightley's focus was all her own, and had first become apparent at the absurdly young age of 3.

She was born Kiera Knightley on the 22nd of March, 1985, in Teddington, south-west London. Her name would become Keira as her Hollywood career took off, the change shamelessly breaking the golden rule of "I before E except after C" but making the name more easily pronounceable on a worldwide basis. Her father was stage actor Will Knightley, who'd make the occasional foray into television, such as starring as Mr Glegg in the BBC's 1997 production of The Mill On The Floss. Her Ayrshire-born mother, Sharman MacDonald, had also been a stage and TV actress (she once appeared in Shoestring). Having joined the Drama Society at Edinburgh University in 1972, then worked as a go-go dancer to pay her Drama School fees, she'd battled against stage fright for 12 years. Eventually, pregnant with Keira and having borne son Caleb five years earlier (he'd go on to teach music to underprivileged kids), in 1984 she gave up acting and concentrated on her family.

She also took up a career in playwriting and, after debuting with When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream And Shout, she proceeded to deliver such notable efforts as After Juliet, All Things Nice, The Brave, Sea Urchins, Shades and The Winter Guest, the last being taken to the big screen by Alan Rickman. On top of this, she'd write Wild Flowers and The Music Practice for TV, and a BBC documentary would be made about her, called Mindscape and featuring the young Keira.