Keira Knightley

Keira Christina Knightley was born on 26 March 1985 in the London suburb of Teddington, to stage actors Will Knightley and Sharman Macdonald. She was meant to be named "Kiera", the anglicised form of "Kira", after the Soviet figure skater Kira Ivanova, whom her father admired; however, Macdonald misspelt the name when she registered her daughter's birth certificate, writing the e before the i. Her father is English and her mother is of Scottish and Welsh descent. Knightley has an older brother, Caleb. Macdonald worked as a playwright after her acting career came to an end. Knightley's parents encountered substantial financial difficulties following the birth of her brother; her father, a "middling" actor, agreed to a second child only if her mother sold a script first. However, her parents' varying degrees of success did not deter Knightley's curiosity about the profession. Macdonald introduced her own children to theatre and ballet very early. This inspired Knightley's interest in acting. Knightley attended Teddington School. She was diagnosed with dyslexia at age six, but by the time she was eleven, with her parents' support, she says, "they deemed me to have got over it sufficiently". She is still a slow reader and cannot read out loud. Knightley has said she was "single-minded about acting". At age three, she requested to obtain an agent like her parents and secured one at six. This led to her taking a number of small parts in television dramas. She acted in a number of local amateur productions, which included After Juliet, written by her mother, and United States, written by her drama teacher. Knightley began studying her A-Levels at Esher College, but left after a year to pursue an acting career. Her mother's friends encouraged her to go to drama school, which she declined for financial and professional reasons.