Keira says motherhood exhausting than films

What was more exhausting, I ask Keira Knightley: that five-year period in her career when she made a bazillion massive films, including Bend It Like Beckham, Atonement, Pirates of the Caribbean, Pride & Prejudice and Love Actually, or... early motherhood? “Early motherhood!” she answers instantly, without a blink. “There is nothing that can prepare you for that level of exhaustion if you happen to have a sleepless child.”

Knightley, 40, and her husband, the musician James Righton, tried “everything” to get their first daughter Edie, now 10, to sleep through the night. They finally succeeded with a very lovely bedtime routine, which has now, years later, resulted in something completely unintended but quite special: Knightley’s debut children’s book, I Love You Just the Same. Over a five-month period, Knightley would draw a picture every time Edie went to sleep, so that when she woke up, she’d know her mum had been thinking of her. “It turned into a kind of dialogue between us, where she’d say, ‘OK, can there be a bird? Can there be a cat?’”

Which helps to explain Knightley’s cross-generational appeal. To us, she is one of the defining stars of British film from the past 25 years. But in the eyes of my daughter — who at eight months old is very partial to the actor’s feline illustrations — she is simply the lady who drew the cat. Is this new guise the reason I don’t recognise Knightley when I first arrive to meet her at a cafe in North London? She’s so inconspicuous that when the waiter asks if the woman in the stripy shirt with the brown bob is the person I’m looking for, I say no, until a familiar face leans round, mouthing: “Are you...?” and I realise that, actually, she is. Only when I’m sitting opposite her does it all come into focus: the film-star face; the makeup-less but luminous skin; the truly, truly great eyebrows.

The male gaze doesn’t interest me as much as the female gaze

Knightley has perfected the art of blending in. In 2002, her breakout role in the football-based Brit flick Bend It Like Beckham brought a cascade of lead parts and an unbearable level of tabloid scrutiny. As a teenager, she endured the bruising experience of becoming one of the most famous women in the world, tormented by paparazzi and picked apart in the press. To those of us who had watched Knightley grow up, her admission in 2018 that she’d had a breakdown aged 22 made depressing sense.

Since then, she’s slowed down and gracefully ducked the spotlight. Nurturing a respected career on her own terms, she continually makes interesting choices, from playing Alan Turing’s codebreaker confidante Joan Clarke in 2014’s The Imitation Game (for which she received her second Oscar nod) to starring as the trailblazing French author Colette in a 2018 biopic, and, more recently, as a government minister’s wife and secret agent in Netflix’s Christmassy gorefest Black Doves. Now, she’s doing something no one expected: publishing a children’s book. When her foray into fiction was announced last year, the news was met with a backlash from kids’ authors worried about entitled A-list pretenders on their turf (Matthew McConaughey, Channing Tatum and the Duchess of Sussex are among the celebs to have dabbled in the genre).

Knightley acknowledges the criticism. “I mean, it’s going to happen. And I hear it, you know? I think it’s like in any creative industry, the space for anyone is very hard — if it’s actors, if it’s musicians. I’m sure it’s the same for writers. So I have sympathy for it.”

But it would be wrong to dismiss Knightley as just another star cynically cashing in on the kids’ books boom. Inspired by Edie and her younger daughter Delilah, now six, I Love You Just the Same is the delicately drawn, touchingly personal story of an older sister adjusting to the arrival of a new baby. It’s written with the understanding that the greatest children’s literature is stuffed with darkness and peril, the seed of the story coming from a request Edie made when her little sister was teething and crying all day: “She was like, ‘Can you draw a picture of the bird taking the baby away?’”

Meeting Knightley, I feel it’s on brand that she celebrated her 40th birthday making knives with her husband in a forge in North Wales. There’s a breezy friendliness to her conversation that belies an inner steel — the same kind that runs through the veins of her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet, a character who will charm her way through a dull ball but shoot an icy glare at injustice or imbecility. (It was that role in Pride & Prejudice that landed Knightley her first Oscar nomination at just 20.) She laughs readily at most things, and gives the sense that she knows what you’re going to say before you do — and has already thought it through.

When I ask if anything makes her nervous about raising girls, she shoots back, “What, you mean social media?” Knightley is happy to admit she doesn’t know the answer to society’s most anxiety-inducing parenting conundrum.