Keira Knightley

Knightley, born in London as a child of actors Will Knightley & Sharman Macdonald aged six, was the first actress to be employed by TV commercials and film. Knightley was in Sabe in a tiny part in Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1998). Her breakthrough came when she played a teen football player in the sports documentary Bend It Like Beckham (2002) in which she later achieved the world's attention for her performance as Elizabeth Swann in the swashbuckler Fantasy series Pirates of the Caribbean, beginning in 2003. In 2003, she was a star as a romantic in Love Actually and was called a promising teenager. Knightley won an Academy Award nod for Best Actress in 2005 when she played Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of the romantic historical novel Pride & Prejudice. The actress appeared in a myriad of other period films, playing a complex love relationship at the end of Atonement (2007), tastemaker Georgiana Cavendish, in The Duchess (2008), and the titular socialite from Anna Karenina (2012). In the contemporary dramas she played an aspiring music student as in Begin Again (2012) and an aspiring doctor in Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit (2013). Knightley was back in historical films with The Imitation Game in 2014 when she was nominated to win an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. In the year 2018, Knightley played the writer Colette.