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"  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. &amp;quot;Oh, my God,&amp;quot; she says, taken aback. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;m aware of it now.&amp;quot; This doesn&amp;#039;t seem plausible. &amp;quot;No, you&amp;#039;re right,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m lying. I&amp;#039;m lying. I don&amp;#039;t know why I said that.&amp;quot; She reconsiders. &amp;quot;No, I&amp;#039;m not lying, actually,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll just have an argument with myself!&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s laughing, and her laugh is throaty and uninhibited, but there&amp;#039;s something about all of this Wimbledon-style back-and-forth that&amp;#039;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 \u00ADKatharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo to Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie \u00ADFoster, and Uma Thurman. The classic beauty must be stunning, of course, but in a very specific way. If, in unofficial \u00ADHollywood 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 \u00ADKnightley, 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&amp;#039;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 &amp;quot;having an argument with myself,&amp;quot; she&amp;#039;s joking, yeah, but she&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s Pride &amp;amp;amp; Prejudice, that she can act. But when you look at her \u00ADcareer choices, it&amp;#039;s clear she has never had any intention of \u00ADgetting stuck playing damsels in distress. 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&amp;#039;s costume designer, custom-made the trousers when Knightley swooned over a similar pair on the set. They&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s pretty much blinding.  &amp;quot;She loves fashion, she enjoys it and relishes it, but Keira has a very individual style,&amp;quot; Rhys says. &amp;quot;I think that comes with a degree of bravery when you&amp;#039;re that much of a public figure, but you still wear what you want\u2014and sometimes it&amp;#039;s -ballsy. I love that. It shows great strength.&amp;quot; Which brings us back to our original question, the one about when she first became aware of sexual power. Knightley does, in fact, have an answer. One day, years ago, she was in London&amp;#039;s Waterloo Station with her mother, the playwright Sharman Macdonald, waiting for a train. A man approached. &amp;quot;Hi,&amp;quot; he said to Knightley. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d really like to take you out.&amp;quot; She aimed those big brown eyes at him and said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m 13.&amp;quot; His face fell. He dashed away. Looking back, Knightley thinks she was too blunt with the guy. &amp;quot;The poor man!&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I mean, I feel sorry for him now. He was perfectly nice and he just didn&amp;#039;t realize that I was 13, because I did look a lot older. He probably never spoke to a woman again. He went straight into therapy.&amp;quot; If Atonement is about anything, it&amp;#039;s about just that\u2014sexual power\u2014or at least the power of sex to liberate and destabilize us at the same time, and the ways in which innocence can -really confuse things.  When you first meet the film&amp;#039;s central characters, Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner, played by Knightley and McAvoy, it&amp;#039;s a muggy summer day in the 1930s and they&amp;#039;re on the brink of an argument. Clenched and brooding, Cecilia appears to be trying to find a bucket of ice in which she can cool down a bottle of rage. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s why I was fascinated by Cecilia\u2014she is like a pressure cooker,&amp;quot; Knightley says. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s really pissed off and she doesn&amp;#039;t know why. She&amp;#039;s pissed off with Robbie, and she doesn&amp;#039;t know why, but she f--king hates him.&amp;quot; Moments later, in Atonement&amp;#039;s pivotal scene, Cecilia and Robbie are coupling explosively against the shelf of a library in a grand English mansion. The event is witnessed by Cecilia&amp;#039;s 13-year-old sister, Briony, who misinterprets what&amp;#039;s going on and eventually makes a decision that destroys their lives. Although the library scene seems to unfold naturally on screen, the stars and director Joe Wright describe that day of shooting as one of acute awkwardness. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re having to kiss someone you don&amp;#039;t love,&amp;quot; says McAvoy, who is married to the actress Anne-Marie Duff. (Knightley met her own boyfriend, the actor Rupert Friend, on the set of Pride &amp;amp;amp; Prejudice.) &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not drunk, so you don&amp;#039;t have that excuse. And there&amp;#039;s lots of people watching you, so it&amp;#039;s very strange. You don&amp;#039;t want to make the other person uncomfortable. When you&amp;#039;re touching someone&amp;#039;s breast or putting your tongue in their mouth, the potential to screw up is huge.&amp;quot;  Wright did two things to alleviate the tension. First, he played &amp;quot;This,&amp;quot; a song by Brian Eno, to put everyone in a mood of spellbound rapture, and then gave the actors very specific physical directions so that they would know, without hesitation, how and where to move their bodies. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like a fight, doing a love scene,&amp;quot; Wright says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a piece of choreography.&amp;quot; He turned the music up very loud, which meant that he had to shout his instructions. At one point, the song came to an abrupt end. &amp;quot;But I didn&amp;#039;t reduce the volume of my voice,&amp;quot; Wright says, &amp;quot;and I could suddenly be heard shouting, `Keira, wank him off!&amp;#039; Which I was mercilessly ripped about for some weeks afterward.&amp;quot; For the record, our classic beauty is happy to dispel lingering questions about that scene: &amp;quot;There was no knob--touching, for real,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But it certainly looked like that.&amp;quot; There is a word that crops up beguilingly often in an evening&amp;#039;s chat with Knightley: hate. For instance: &amp;quot;I hate cute,&amp;quot; she is saying. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve always hated cutesy. My mom used to ban the word cute. Absolutely banned.&amp;quot;  Because she has played a variety of corseted rich girls, and because she&amp;#039;s got (as McAvoy puts it) a &amp;quot;posh accent&amp;quot; and (as Wright puts it) &amp;quot;posh cheekbones,&amp;quot; you might be led to -assume that there is something Hyde Park\u2013princessy about Knightley. If so, you would be wrong. &amp;quot;The first time I met her was in Montreal, Canada, and she was shooting The Jacket,&amp;quot; says Wright, who directed her in Pride &amp;amp;amp; Prejudice before they teamed up for Atonement. &amp;quot;It was snowing, and I arrived at about midnight in this basement bar of the hotel she was staying in. I imagined I was about to meet this glamorous starlet, and in walked this scruffy kid with holes in her jeans and a funny woolly hat on. She was immediately beguiling and real and honest and totally disarming.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s a feisty woman,&amp;quot; says Maybury, who has directed her for a second time in The Edge of Love. &amp;quot;Because she&amp;#039;s so beautiful, people think of a pretty dolly that can just be played with. She&amp;#039;s not a dumb chick at all. Far, far from it.&amp;quot; In Love, Knightley plays a World War II chanteuse who sings in the London tube stations and eventually shacks up in Wales with the poet Dylan Thomas and his wife, Caitlin, after her husband heads off to battle. Knightley&amp;#039;s mother wrote the screenplay. Rhys plays the poet, and his fierce-willed mate is brought to life by Sienna Miller, who quickly became Knightley&amp;#039;s pal and confidant on set. &amp;quot;What I absolutely loved is that the two of them said, `I wish I was more like you&amp;#039;\u2014they saw qualities in each other that they both would&amp;#039;ve liked,&amp;quot; Rhys says. &amp;quot;When youwalk into a party, Sienna can sort of become the life of it very quickly. Sienna would say that she wished she was a bit more like Keira and didn&amp;#039;t end up on the table dancing and shouting.&amp;quot; The women bond in the film, too. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a really beautiful love story between the two girls; it&amp;#039;s not a one-way ticket to the isle of Lesbos,&amp;quot; Maybury says. &amp;quot;But Keira and Sienna do have a bath together in one scene.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just two girls doing their washing,&amp;quot; Rhys explains. &amp;quot;The fact that it&amp;#039;s Knightley and Miller ups the ante a bit.&amp;quot; That said, a drunken Dylan Thomas does not stumble upon these feminine ablutions. &amp;quot;I offered that idea in rehearsals, but it was shot down quite quickly,&amp;quot; Rhys jokes. &amp;quot;I begged, offered money\u2014I did everything to ingratiate myself into that scene.&amp;quot; Some quick observations about Knightley: She is still not sure how to pronounce Shia LaBeouf, but she does know how to say \u00CEle Saint-Louis, and when she envisions a perfect day, that&amp;#039;s where she sees herself, sitting at a caf\u00E9 along the Seine in Paris, equipped with little more than &amp;quot;a plain green salad, but with a really good mustardy dressing, and rillettes, French bread, and a really good glass of red wine.&amp;quot; If she could, she would watch Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story on a loop, again and again and again. (She can watch DVDs at home in London, but she can&amp;#039;t watch TV itself. She disabled the tube. &amp;quot;I chucked it,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s important to do things and keep your brain active.&amp;quot;)  She doesn&amp;#039;t have much interest in doing romantic comedies, because most of them aren&amp;#039;t witty enough anymore\u2014they&amp;#039;ve traded snap for sap. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a total romantic\u2014I love romantic films,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I don&amp;#039;t like being raped by sugar.&amp;quot; She does have an interest in shaking things up, which is why her roles have swung like a pendulum from the mainstream to the marginal, from dark and dirty to delicate and wee. She knows that the edgy Domino wound up shooting blanks at the box office, but that doesn&amp;#039;t bother her. &amp;quot;That is a film that belongs in an art gallery,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I remember when Domino came out and it didn&amp;#039;t do well. I was on the set of Pirates, and people were coming up to me like it was a funeral. And I guess I just don&amp;#039;t see it like that. Obviously I know the business side of it, but I am fundamentally not in it for that reason. I&amp;#039;m very, very selfishly in it because it interests me, and that will lead me to do films that don&amp;#039;t do well at the box office.&amp;quot;  She smokes the occasional cigarette, even though she knows it&amp;#039;s bad for her. The other day she splurged on a $28 bottle of Ch\u00E2teauneuf-du-Pape, and she&amp;#039;s feeling guilty about it, or at least pretending to. &amp;quot;My dad says I&amp;#039;m a complete snob because I shouldn&amp;#039;t be spending \u00A314\u2014and I shouldn&amp;#039;t\u2014on a bottle of wine. He says that \u00A37.99 is completely fine, and I&amp;#039;m being a wanker.&amp;quot;  She was raised in what sounds, now, like a lost world. Her father, actor Will Knightley, emerged from London&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;70s left-wing theater movement. Her mother cranked out plays and novels that hummed with the shock waves of feminism and the sexual revolution. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s made a career writing about sex,&amp;quot; Knightley says. &amp;quot;She writes dirty, dirty plays. She had one novel called Night Night, and it was in our school library. It was the one that had been taken out the most, because it opens with a sex scene, or somebody fondling their breasts. I remember being about 12 and finding it and being mortified! I couldn&amp;#039;t believe that my mom had come out with such filth.&amp;quot;  Knightley is not fond of cell phones. &amp;quot;I hate them,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It rings, and then I -realize that I don&amp;#039;t want to talk to anyone. So I always press IGNORE.&amp;quot; This handheld phobia is not an act. So peeved did she become with a BlackBerry when she was shooting the second and third Pirates movies that she hurled it into the briny depths. &amp;quot;Then I went, `Oh, my God, I want to be eco--friendly, but I&amp;#039;ve chucked a BlackBerry into the sea!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;So I went diving into the water, which I hadn&amp;#039;t actually been in, because there were meant to be barracudas or something, and I sort of fished around and couldn&amp;#039;t find it anywhere.&amp;quot; She still worries that she poisoned a barracuda. She never once worried about her publicist trying to reach her, because she does not have a publicist.  In a way, Knightley&amp;#039;s classicism has put her at odds with the prevailing winds of pop culture. She won&amp;#039;t talk about her boyfriend. She won&amp;#039;t read the tabloids. But now and then she&amp;#039;ll meet up with famous people and realize that all of that ambient gossip and spite has seeped into her life. &amp;quot;You say hello and realize that you know who their last three boyfriends were, when they were last in rehab, and the rest of it,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And you think, I don&amp;#039;t know you! How dare I have this information about you? This is sick! I mean, this is voyeurism to a -really disgusting level. I just find it sort of jaw-dropping that we&amp;#039;ve been brainwashed into believing that that&amp;#039;s all right.&amp;quot;  She goes on. &amp;quot;What I hate is that they shove in your face: This is what you want to be,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And you think, F--k that. I don&amp;#039;t want it. Stop telling me I want to look like her. Stop telling me I want that life. I don&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot;  Earlier this year in the UK, her psychic skirmish with the tabloids took a darker turn when The Daily Mail published a photo of a rail-thin Knightley in a bikini and implied that her celebrity skinniness had been an influence on a 19-year-old girl who&amp;#039;d died of anorexia. Knightley filed a libel lawsuit against the newspaper and in May won a settlement of roughly $6,000. She says the original article was &amp;quot;horrendous and completely devastating, not only because of the actual girl, but because on another level it could potentially have ruined my career. Because if I had been anorexic, there is no way I would have been able to do a lot of the action movies that I do. People wouldn&amp;#039;t have hired me. So when things are written that are trying to ruin my career, as that one was, I obviously have to take that very seriously.&amp;quot; Knightley has stated, publicly and often, that she is not anorexic and attributes some of the ongoing speculation to flippant comments that she made about her body when she first started to get attention in the press. &amp;quot;I was 18,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And the idea that an 18-year-old girl is not going to be in some way feeling awkward is ridiculous. I wouldn&amp;#039;t say that I have body issues, but if you&amp;#039;re going to ask me whether I&amp;#039;m completely, 100 percent satisfied, of course I&amp;#039;m not. Nobody is.&amp;quot; Naturally Hepburn and Garbo had their gripes about rumormongering too. But the classic beauty must always rise above. &amp;quot;There is a culture at the moment that very much idealizes youth and yet rips it apart at the same time, and if you&amp;#039;re caught in the middle of it, it&amp;#039;s very frightening,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And it does take a minute or two to be able to go, `F--k you all. I actually don&amp;#039;t care. And I&amp;#039;m actually fine.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Just as often, in fact, she has played damsels who cause distress: Consider her fierce, battle-hungry Guinevere in 2004&amp;#039;s King Arthur, or her belligerent, potty-mouthed bounty hunter in 2005&amp;#039;s Domino. &amp;quot;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,&amp;quot; says John Maybury, who directed her in 2005&amp;#039;s The Jacket, an arty, disturbing meditation on the nature of free will. &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;d expect from a grande dame on a West End stage. Even in the big movies, she&amp;#039;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: &amp;quot;This is a girl who knows exactly how to work a close-up.&amp;quot;  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&amp;#039;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. &amp;quot;So many actors her age do just kind of get waylaid and sidetracked with celebrity,&amp;quot; says James McAvoy, her Atonement costar. &amp;quot;She likes what she does, so why would she want to disrespect it? She&amp;#039;s very good at what she does, so why would she want to undermine people&amp;#039;s opinion of her?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What really sets me off?&amp;quot; Knightley asks. She&amp;#039;s leaning forward on the edge of a couch in a stance that suggests a boxer waiting for the bell. &amp;quot;Anything. I mean, really anything. I&amp;#039;m a moody bastard. Actually, I&amp;#039;ve been banned from reading newspapers because the way they&amp;#039;re written angers me so much. If I want an opinion, then I&amp;#039;ll read the opinion part of the newspaper. I do not want it when I&amp;#039;m trying to get the facts. I get incredibly angry. It really f--ks me off. See, I have to calm down about it.&amp;quot;  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&amp;#039;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. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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