Keira Knightley has never attempted to mask her loathing for the British press. So it comes as no surprise to hear that she is quitting London to settle down away from prying eyes in the countryside with lover Rupert Friend.

The actress, who is tipped to be nominated for an Oscar for her role in Atonement, said she despises the showbiz lifestyle to such an extent that, in the same fashion as host of other celebrities including Kate Moss and Billie Piper, she has decided to buy a bolthole in the country.

“I’m moving out of the centre so that I can lead a more domestic life,” she explains.

“I want to have local things like shops and nice pubs. Central London is just too busy. I am also not a very sociable person,” she added.

“I went to the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party and just stood in the corner drinking champagne. Honestly, I don’t like parties very much. I have very few real friends in showbusiness so it’s really not my crowd.”

One can only hope that Knightley doesn’t chose to house hunt in Gloucestershire, the focal point of the showbiz mass exodus.

Director Gurinder Chadha has admitted she didn’t think Keira Knightley’s career would take off as quickly as it has after she cast her in Bend It Like Beckham.

The 47-year-old - who has just completed filming her latest project Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging - said Golden Globe-nominated Keira has done “extremely well”.

She added: “I never imagined her getting so big, so fast but that’s the business, you know it can happen - it can happen to anyone at anytime.

“She’s very British identified, she doesn’t necessarily buy all that Hollywood stuff and her feet are very firmly on the ground. She’s a sensible girl so I’m very pleased that she’s taking it all in the stride.”

Gurinder, who recently returned to her school, Clifton Primary in Southall, to direct their play, reminisced about casting Keira.

“She was only 16 when she came into my audition room for Bend It Like Beckham and I had seen about 25 girls that day and so when she came in I knew there was something special about her,” she said.

“She did a great job on Beckham and every film she makes, she’s getting better and better and it’s great to see her flying so high.”

Gurinder’s coming of age comedy, Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging, based on the books by Louise Rennison, will be released in July.

Besides being one of the most-photographed and scrutinized women in the world not named Lindsay, Britney or Paris, Keira Knightley has something else on her side: actual, honest-to-goodness critical acclaim. Sure, she’s starred in three little pirate movies too, but at 22 years old, Knightley is already an Oscar nominee and a two-time Golden Globe lead actress contender, plus she’s got the plum role in the biggest weep-fest this side of “Titanic.”

In “Atonement,” Knightley trades stolen glances with co-star James McAvoy, as larger forces conspire to keep the would-be lovers apart. If it sounds like the kind of movie they don’t make anymore, you’re right. Knightley stopped by MTV to talk about the film, why sex scenes aren’t her favorite thing to do, and why you probably won’t see her starring opposite Will Ferrell anytime soon.

MTV: This is very much … an old-fashioned story. It’s a story that we don’t see done, the right way at least, anymore, it seems like, in Hollywood. Is that part of the appeal for you when you sign on for something like this?

Keira Knightley: Yeah, it was. I am a huge fan of films from the ’30s and ’40s … particularly British ones. … I think we make films that are incredibly sentimental now, and then they were kind of much more, I suppose, intelligent and sort of witty. So [director] Joe Wright first came to me with this project … about a year ago … and said, “I want to make a film the way they made them in the ’40s, and I want you to act in that ’40s British style.” And I thought that was really exciting.

MTV: A lot of people are going to walk out of the theater bawling. … Can you separate yourself, can you get emotional watching this film?

Knightley: I can totally, because I am only in about a third of it. So the two-thirds of it that I am not in, I can get very emotional. It was amazing — we took it to … the Venice Film Festival, and … it was received really well. … There were all these women in incredible dresses and made up to the nines, and they came out and all the makeup had smudged all over their faces and they just looked a mess. So I definitely say, if you’re a girl, don’t wear too much makeup when you’re going to see it.

MTV: Are you an easy crier when it comes to films?

Knightley: Yeah, I am. I like a good cry. I think those are the films I like the most. I like ones that make me cry.

MTV: What’s a sure [movie to make you cry]?

Knightley: There’s millions of them. Pretty much anything. I cry at anything.

MTV: You have a love scene with [James] McAvoy about halfway through this … you can’t say it’s gratuitous in any way, because … the plot hinges upon this very important scene. Do you ever get blasé about that kind of a scene? Can you get used to it?

Knightley: They’re always the ones that you are going to feel uncomfortable about. … They’re always very, very odd. But this one was actually much better than most of them, ’cause normally what you usually get from a director is, “Oh, you know what to do. Just go for it.” And you think, “Well, no. I’m in a room with a stranger, in front of a load full of strangers — no, weirdly I don’t know what to do.” … It really is an important scene. It’s kind of the peak of that first third of the film, and you’ve got to believe that these two people wait for each other for five years, based on this one moment. So it had to be passionate, and it had to be erotic. And Joe storyboarded the whole thing, so absolutely everything in it was planned, and it was all discussed beforehand as well. He was actually talking us through it as we went along, which was rather bizarre.

MTV: I heard that … you’re a big fan of “Blades of Glory”?

Knightley: Yeah! … I don’t normally watch films like that, and it was great!

MTV: Would that be something that would make you nervous to jump into, a Will Ferrell comedy?

Knightley: Yes, it would make me terrified, I think.

MTV: Just because you don’t think it’s in your wheelhouse?

Knightley: No, it’s not that. … I guess I’m into much darker things at the moment. … I think I am quite frightened of comedy. It’s never something that I’ve watched a lot of. I think people can always, like, quote comic films, and I’ve never been able to do that. I can quote you the tragic ones, but not the comic ones.

MTV: Are you self-conscious watching yourself onscreen, or has that gotten better over the years?

Knightley: No, I think if anything, it’s got worse. I can’t watch myself at all. … I’m not really interested in trying to look at myself in a film and go, “Yeah, good job.” … I’m incredibly critical. And I like being critical — I like watching it and picking it apart. But I think the thing about acting is that it’s true to that moment. You make a choice for that moment, and it’s caught on film, but you wouldn’t make the same choice even the next day. So … I watch and go, “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do this?” So it’s never a particularly nice experience, watching myself.

MTV: You’ve shot “Edge of Love” with Sienna Miller. Tell me about your character and [her] relationship … to the other characters?

Knightley: It’s a story of a friendship group around the poet Dylan Thomas. It’s sort of an imploding friendship group, and an act of violence that happens, and it’s about the circumstances that lead up to that act of violence. I play Vera Phillips, who in real life was in fact Dylan Thomas’ childhood sweetheart, and he did live with her during the Second World War with his wife, Caitlin, who Sienna Miller plays.

MTV: I am just being a journalist here … [Sienna told me about] a bathtub scene?

Knightley: We did get in the bath together, yeah. Washing our knickers in the bathtub.

MTV: I don’t approve.

Knightley: Really?

MTV: No, I approve.

Knightley: Oh, good. [She laughs.]

(CBS) If there really were such a thing as a charmed life, Keira Knightley, it would seem, is living it.

The success of the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie spawned two sequels and soon, Knightley, 22, had more offers than she had time to accept. She found time for the 2006 production of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and her most recent work, an adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel, “Atonement.”

In “Atonement,” which is out this week, Knightley plays Cecilia Tallis, a haughty socialite ultimately transformed by love and duty as a nurse during World War II.

“I completely fell in love with her the first time I read the script,” she said. “I wanted to do something that was more challenging as well. I mean, I think every role is challenging, but I definitely wanted to do something that was very definitely a woman as opposed to a girl. And the fact that she was difficult and on edge I thought was very appealing.”

Her role in “Pride and Prejudice” picked up an Oscar nomination. And her role in “Atonement” has Oscar watchers buzzing all over again.

“I’ve never felt that I was, in any way, exploited in any of the kind of film experiences that I’ve had,” she told CBS News correspondent Tracy Smith.

She never felt like she needed to change who she was or the way she looked, which is common in Hollywood.

“Which is quite amazing, because I’ve got wonky teeth,” she said. “And I keep hearing about everybody going to Hollywood and, you know, their agents going, ‘Straighten your teeth,’ or, ‘Whiten your teeth,’ but nobody’s ever said anything about my teeth. They’re not straight, apparently. But nobody’s ever said anything, which is quite nice I suppose.”

However “wonky” her teeth may be, they haven’t slowed her down.

Knightley was born in 1985 to Sharman MacDonald - a Scottish actress and playwright - and actor Will Knightley. She grew up watching mom and dad work and it didn’t take long for the acting bug to bite. At an age when most children ask for toys, Knightley wanted an agent.

But she had trouble in school and was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was six. A teacher told her parents that they needed to dangle a carrot to encourage her to work harder at her studies.

“My mom said, ‘Well, she wants an agent. She wants to act. But I’m not gonna let her do it.’ And he said, ‘Well, I think that’s the only way that she’s ever going to learn to read is if you give that as a gift at the end,’” Knightley said. “So I had to come to her with a book in my hand and a smile on my face every day through the summer holidays when I was 6. And, at the end, I was allowed an agent.”

She made her screen debut at 7, but Knightley’s first real brush with international stardom came at 16, in a low-budget film about the lives of girls on a teenage soccer team: “Bend It Like Beckham.”

“I remember telling friends I was doing this girls’ soccer movie that was called ‘Bend It Like Beckham,’ and everybody laughed,” she said. “It was sort of quite embarrassing, really. And nobody thought that it was gonna be any good.”

As it turns out, the little movie was a big hit, and Knightley was becoming a star on the Hollywood field. After that, came “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

“Another one where people laughed when I told them about it,” she said. “I said it was based on a Disney theme park ride. And everyone just went, ‘Oh, that sounds good. Yeah. Good luck with that one!’

“Nobody knew whether it was going to work or not; or whether people were going to like it or not. And I remember being on set just sort of going, ‘OK, what is this? Is this any good?’”

What’s more, Knightley had severe doubts about her own ability as well. Early on, she thought she was going to be fired.

“I’m actually convinced [of that] on every single film I do,” she said. “But on ‘Pirates’ I was absolutely convinced. And I remember going up for the audition and phoning my agent and saying, ‘Don’t send me up for this. I’m not gonna get it. This is completely stupid. There’s no point.’”

Even after being offered the role, she was so convinced that she wasn’t going to last that she flew out to the film’s location with only a week’s worth of clothes.

But being a real-life movie star is not without its challenges: the more successful Knightley becomes, it would seem, the more intense the scrutiny.

“I’m not comfortable with it,” she said. “I think it’s safe to say I hate it. It’s the idea of being watched. It’s 24/7 surveillance. I think it’s a very strange voyeurism. It makes me feel dirty. I don’t want to be a part of that.”

Perhaps the biggest criticism she has received is that she is too thin. Knightley sued the London Daily Mail - and won - for an article suggesting that photos of her skinny frame inspired anorexia. But then she posed naked for Vanity Fair with another hot young star, Scarlett Johansson.

“Why not?” she said. “I was 20, you’ve got one of the best photographers in the world. I kind of do want to look back at myself when I’m 75 and go, ‘Look, ha, I did that!’ I don’t know, I thought it was a giggle. And, no, I’m not completely comfortable with my body. But I think, at some point, you go, ‘OK, either I’m going to be frightened of this, or I’m going to do it.’”

As immodest as that may seem, Knightley seems to make a point of being modest when it comes to her success.

“I think luck is the answer,” she said. “I have been very lucky. I’d love to say that I deserve it, but I probably don’t. You never know what films are gonna work and what’s gonna capture people’s imaginations. And I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with quite a few films that have.”

Trophy season kicked into high gear Thursday morning, with an impressive roster of seven movies nominated for best dramatic picture in the Golden Globes race.

The period romance Atonement, starring nominees Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, led the pack with seven nominations. The movie, besides being in the running for best picture, was also singled out for its direction, by Joe Wright, and its screenplay, by Christopher Hampton.

Keira Knightley is ready to party – with her cast and crew of Atonement, which topped the list of Golden Globe nominees on Thursday, with seven nods, including one for herself and another for her leading man, James McAvoy, as well as for the WWII drama itself, as best picture.

“It’s just so exciting that we’ve got nominated in so many categories,” the British actress, 22, tells the Associated Press. “There’s such a big group of us that can get to go together. It will be a real celebration for the film. It will be a wonderful night.”

Atonement’s supporting actress nominee Saoirse Ronan is all of 13 years old. The Dublin-born teen, currently in Pennsylvania to shoot her new movie The Lovely Bones, tells PEOPLE: “I started doing films two years ago [but] I never expected anything like this would happen. It’s really lovely.”

In the period dramas her name has become synonymous with, Keira Knightley’s costumes seldom give much away about what lies beneath. So it was probably quite liberating for the Oscar-nominated actress to strip to the bare essentials for a recent photoshoot.
Miss Knightley, who at 22 is the country’s most successful young actress, posed for this thrilling shoot with just knickers, black stilettos and the flimsiest of tops to cover her modesty. One image, where she arches her back seductively, half-balancing on a chair, appears to have been arranged just to accentuate her curves. Keira’s slender frame has in the past attracted comment. Yet in this picture her clothes have been styled to give her a much more voluptuous appeal, by accentuating her muscular legs and giving her a billowing bust.
In another of the shots, taken by celebrated photographer Sam Taylor-Wood, Keira’s top half is naked apart from a pair of black braces and long black gloves. In both images, Miss Knightley of course mouths that ever-present pout.
Speaking to America’s Interview magazine, which carries the pictures, Keira, who has frequently spoken of her exasperation at the media’s obsession with her weight, again talks about her body image. Asked whether she felt responsible for girls becoming anorexic, she answered: “No because I have no control over it. You could say ‘You’re responsible for girls being anorexic because you are thin’, but I can’t be anything I’m not.
“I don’t believe in role models. I don’t believe that any person can be put up there as being better than any other person. “Personally, I think I have the right to make as many mistakes as I like without having to feel guilty about a young girl going ‘Wow, you’re making that mistake, so should I’. People are cleverer than that.”
She clearly is not happy taking on the responsibility of her position - though she is yet to complain about the size of the paycheques rolling in.

Keira Knightley admits she can’t keep her clothes on.

Last year she went nude for Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue. Now the 22-year-old is topless on the cover of Interview and posing for a new Chanel ad with only a strategically placed hat. What gives?

“I don’t know. People ask [me to pose naked] and I just say yes,” the Atonement star told Ellen DeGeneres on Thursday’s show. “I find it vaguely liberating.”

“I hope I don’t become a nudist,” added the Oscar-nominated actress. “I am on my way.”

When DeGeneres noted, “I don’t know why you put on clothes to come to the show,” Knightley gamely offered, “Should I take them off now?”

“No, no,” the talks show host responded quickly. “We’re on daytime.”

The London-based actress also addressed persistent (and, she says, untrue) rumors that she has an eating disorder. “I haven’t [got one],” she insisted. “Which I’ve said a lot.” Knightly insists her famously thin physique is the result of good genes and a healthy diet.

“I don’t eat junk,” she told DeGeneres. “I cook. I go to farmers markets in London and cook really good sort of organic foods.”

Knightley – famous for her period roles in Pirates of the Caribbean and Pride & Prejudice – also said she doesn’t go to the gym. Still, she added, “The corsets are a workout. Heavy dresses and all that.”

Keira Knightley, braving the snowy New York weather while out for a walk in SoHo with beau Rupert Friend. The next night, the couple, in hip attire, cozied up to each other at a Chanel Beauté dinner at New York eatery Balthazar to celebrate the actress’s film Atonement. A source at the party tells us that Friend kept his arm around his girlfriend all night, adding that they were “very sweet together.”

The A-list actress dishes to ELLE on why she’s not just another pretty face.
On a cold, pewter-gray evening in London, Keira Knightley is asked if she remembers the first time she became aware of her own sexual power.
“Oh, my God,” she says, taken aback. “I don’t think I’m aware of it now.” This doesn’t seem plausible. “No, you’re right,” she says. “I’m lying. I’m lying. I don’t know why I said that.” She reconsiders. “No, I’m not lying, actually,” she says. “I’ll just have an argument with myself!”
She’s laughing, and her laugh is throaty and uninhibited, but there’s something about all of this Wimbledon-style back-and-forth that’s worth taking note of. Let me explain.
In the Hollywood scheme of things, Knightley qualifies as a classic beauty. Every era must have at least one, and the movies have blessed us with many over the years, from ­Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo to Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie ­Foster, and Uma Thurman. The classic beauty must be stunning, of course, but in a very specific way. If, in unofficial ­Hollywood parlance, a total babe tends to be an overtly sexual bombshell with a dash of the girl next door, a classic beauty comes across as more intellectual, regal, exquisite. She stands out in the culture because of her refinement and high standards, and she generally needs to have cheekbones that look, in profile, as though Bernini had carved them from marble. We can confidently say these things about Keira ­Knightley, and that helps us understand why designers such as Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, Valentino, Gucci, and Matthew Williamson have dressed her swanlike frame for the red carpet. It explains, too, why Chanel, a luxury brand that signifies classicism at its very core, has tapped Knightley to be the face of its Coco Mademoiselle fragrance. (Knightley’s brandishing a bowler hat in the Chanel ads. Bowlers are as classic beauty-ish as you can get.)
But Knightley has also mastered something else: In order to keep the fascination quotient high, a classic beauty must screw with the formula. When Knightley talks about “having an argument with myself,” she’s joking, yeah, but she’s inadvertently revealing something elemental about the role. Like those icons before her, she keeps us guessing.
In the mere five years since she managed to make blocky red soccer shorts alluring in Bend It Like Beckham, Knightley has, at 22, achieved the Hollywood ingenue’s equivalent of a World Cup victory, scoring her way to global domination with the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and proving, with her Oscar-nominated and hummingbird-subtle performance in 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, that she can act. But when you look at her ­career choices, it’s clear she has never had any intention of ­getting stuck playing damsels in distress.
Just as often, in fact, she has played damsels who cause distress: Consider her fierce, battle-hungry Guinevere in 2004’s King Arthur, or her belligerent, potty-mouthed bounty hunter in 2005’s Domino. “She had such an extraordinary ­experience with the pirate movies, where essentially she was sort of a chess piece, or a puppet, being moved around to serve the purposes of what those films do,” says John Maybury, who directed her in 2005’s The Jacket, an arty, disturbing meditation on the nature of free will. “At a certain point, she realized that she was an interchangeable object, and anyone could be that. So, having chosen to be an actor, I guess she wanted to do some acting.” Her efforts were occasionally written off, and in her first few years of fame she took plenty of flak for what seemed to be an ever-present supermodelish pout. By now, though, she has evolved into a stylist of remarkable delicacy, with the mobile, expressive eyes of a silent-film star and the sort of piercing, plummy vocal cadences that you’d expect from a grande dame on a West End stage. Even in the big movies, she’s very good at the tiny gestures. Matthew Rhys, the Welsh actor who costars with Knightley in a just-finished drama called The Edge of Love, puts it this way: “This is a girl who knows exactly how to work a close-up.”
This season, that evolution will reach a new height when Knightley stars in Atonement, a big-screen adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel that is, like Knightley herself, ­simultaneously old-school and contemporary, swellegant and profane. Her timing couldn’t be better. At a moment when her own generation seems to measure stardom by the number of skanked-out snapshots that appear in the tabloids, Knightley comes across as anachronistically committed to honing her craft and growing as an artist and all that sort of stuff. “So many actors her age do just kind of get waylaid and sidetracked with celebrity,” says James McAvoy, her Atonement costar. “She likes what she does, so why would she want to disrespect it? She’s very good at what she does, so why would she want to undermine people’s opinion of her?”
“What really sets me off?” Knightley asks. She’s leaning forward on the edge of a couch in a stance that suggests a boxer waiting for the bell. “Anything. I mean, really anything. I’m a moody bastard. Actually, I’ve been banned from reading newspapers because the way they’re written angers me so much. If I want an opinion, then I’ll read the opinion part of the newspaper. I do not want it when I’m trying to get the facts. I get incredibly angry. It really f–ks me off. See, I have to calm down about it.”
In spite of the gamine delicacy of her profile, nearly everything about Knightley seems primed for combat. Her arms look like those of an Olympic javelin thrower. Her legs have a sort of limber, birch-tree muscularity that you might associate with the Bryn Mawr field-hockey team. Even her eyes are athletic. They’re big and brown, and boxed in black mascara, and she aims them straight at you with the ­unwavering focus of a kid in a staring contest.
Her outfit on this gloomy night is a case study in the way a classic beauty can twist your expectations. The T-shirt from Barneys Co-op looks, with its black horizontal stripes, like something Hepburn would have played nine holes of golf in, and the pants are best described as something David Bowie might have worn to the coolest bullfight in Madrid in 1974. Jacqueline Durran, Atonement’s costume designer, custom-made the trousers when Knightley swooned over a similar pair on the set. They’re black and matadorishly high-waisted, with rows of large buttons down the front. Knightley has rolled the pant legs up to her knees, and on her feet she’s wearing black Converse sneakers, unlaced. Like Hepburn, her idol, she seems to get a kick out of dressing with tomboyish idiosyncrasy. Of course, the gorgeousness breaks through anyway, and it’s pretty much blinding.