Keira Knightley is well known for her role in the festive romantic comedy-drama Love Actually, among countless other Hollywood films since then. There she played Juliet, with her most famous scene as her boyfriend’s best friend who begs her to keep quiet when he professes his love for her on billboards, while posing as a singer.
Keira rose to fame in Bend It Like Beckham in 2002. She also starred in Pride & Prejudice and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Off screen, however, the 37-year-old, from Teddington, south-west London, has had a real life. She began dating indie rocker James Righton in 2011 and the duo tied the knot two years later at a wedding in Mazan, France. They have two daughters, born in 2015 and 2017, and the family now live in Islington, north London.
But things haven’t always been easy for the star, as she was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) aged just 22 after struggling to adjust to A-list celebrity status.
She said in an American podcast: “I had a mental breakdown at 22, so I took a year off and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I went deep into therapy. From the inside, all you hear is the criticism. I literally felt like I was Useless.”
She added that she had to undergo hypnotherapy to find the confidence to attend the 2008 Baftas.
She said: “I hadn’t been out of the house for three months. I actually did hypnotherapy so I could stand on the red carpet at the Baftas and not have a panic attack. I pretty much felt like I didn’t actually exist and I was this weird the creature with this weird face that people seemed to react to in a pretty extreme way, and I couldn’t really figure any of it out.”
