It doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago that Keira Knightley was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy alone made Knightley a household name. The actress has spoken before about how difficult it was for her to handle that level of fame at the time, but considering how terrible the paparazzi were at the time, that’s not entirely shocking.
Celebrity has to be a strange thing at any age, but Knightley was all of 18-years-old when she starred in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. She tells The Times that there was simply a point where things changed, and the paparazzi showed up at her home and then never left. She explained…
I remember waking up one day and there were ten men outside my front door — and they didn’t leave for about five years.
Compared to other celebrities her age, who were stars around that time, such as Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, Knightley had far fewer moments that made for tabloid headlines at the time. However, she says that she did, in fact, “go mad” just like those others. She was just more successful at hiding it.
While paparazzi still follow celebrities and ask them questions, often attempting to get them to say or do something that will make headlines, the problem was even worse decades ago. Knightley remembers the photographers saying some absolutely horrible things simply to elicit a reaction from Knightley or somebody she was with. She continued…
‘Whore!’ It was mostly ‘whore’. ‘Slut’ sometimes. Particularly if I was with someone — a boyfriend, my brother or my dad. They were trying to get a reaction out of them — provoking people into punching them, so they could sue. And that was the time the crashes started happening — they were forcing people off the roads, then getting even bigger money for pictures of a crashed actress or whatever. And then Britney shaved her head so it was like, ‘Great — we can push them into doing something fucking crazy.’
Knightley may not have shaved her head like Britney Spears, but she reacted in her own way. The Love, Actually star says she began to wear the same clothes over and over again as a way to make pictures of her less valuable, a move Daniel Radcliffe would use later. If she knew there were photographers around, she would simply stop walking because a photo of her standing in one place wearing the same clothes she had on yesterday simply wasn’t worth anything to them.
Today, it seems things are much better for the 40-year-old Keira Knightley. She’s got a successful series in Black Doves and a new movie called The Woman in Cabin 10, both available with a Netflix subscription. Keira Knightley is still a star, though she’s one who clearly is enjoying not being hounded by photographers anymore.