Knightley bares all on awards angst

18, Keira Knightley was swashbuckling on the high seas with Johnny Depp in , an adventure she repeated in two sequels. She then fought very different fights alongside Mickey Rourke in and Clive Owen in , and indulged in serious S&M with Michael Fassbender in .

On screen, Knightley is not to be messed with. Off screen she commands respect, too, after translating her early success into an enduring career that also boasts complex character roles in films including , Anna Karenina and most recently as the confidante to Benedict Cumberbatch’s haunted computer genius Alan Turing in Oscar-nominated .

She has followed her Golden Globe nomination for supporting actress for that role with an Oscar nomination. It is the 29-year-old’s second-ever Oscar nomination, after her best actress nomination for Pride & Prejudice in 2006.

The Oscars take place this month and you’ve been nominated. When you’re in a successful film like The Imitation Game, do you spend time thinking about whether you’ll win an award?

Quite a few times I’ve played parts where people have gone ‘Oh my God, this has got to get nominations.’ And it hasn’t. You do go, ‘Oh f–k.’  But you can’t aim to make an award-winning film. You can aim to make the best film you can possibly make. If you get a nomination for something, it’s f–king excellent, and fun and brilliant. But really what matters is that people find the work interesting. You can’t ask for more than that.

You got your first part in a blockbuster at the age of 18 in Pirates of the Caribbean. Did it bother you some people attributed that more to your looks than your acting chops?  ​

At least they weren’t saying I was the ugliest woman in the world. Look, it’s an image-based industry and I know that my looks were partly responsible for my getting the part. But there were a lot of pretty girls up for it, so there must have been something else as well. Looks fade. They fade! If that was all I had to offer, I’d have something to be very worried about.

Written by Ruediger Sturm