Best Actress 2013: Keira Knightley, Can a Song Save Your Life?

Keira Knightley has been kind of under the radar lately, don't you think?  After she left the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, she has been endeavoring smaller ventures with an assortment of directors.  Even when she gathers Oscar buzz for a role, she can fall short on the awards circuit like with A Dangerous Method and Anna Karenina without appearing like she failed.  It's like she slowly accumulating a respectable, but not overbearing oeuvre that is building to ... something.  Along with reteaming with Joe Wright this year, as well as working with David Cronenberg, she has aligned forces with Francois Girard, John Maybury, Saul Dibb, Mark Romanek, Massy Tadjedin, and William Monahan.  Attached mostly to period dramas, she switched things up by costarring with Steve Carrell in the science fiction romance Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, directed by Lorene Scafaria.  The $10M production didn't go anywhere, but it signified that she's ready for a new direction.  As it's important for any actor these days to remain relevant by starring in sure-fire hits, Knightley has returned to her first huge Hollywood movie since Pirates with Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, starring Chris Pine, directed by Kenneth Branagh.  She secured the role over Jessica Biel, Kate Beckinsale, Evangeline Lilly, and Felicity Jones.  She was also slated to play the role of Effie Gray in Untouched, but its competing twin Effie starring Dakota Fanning is way ahead of the game.

That leaves Can a Song Save Your Life?  Knightley took over the role from Scarlett Johansson for Once director John Carney.  He broke hearts and rung out tears five years ago with his international love story.  Song concerns a music executive who takes a younger musician under his wing.  It's not clear who plays whom and how much instrument learning was required, but the movie costars Mark Ruffalo, Hailee Steinfeld, and Adam Levine, and Knightley appears to have a substantial role.  The production team includes Judd Apatow and Exclusive Media Group and filmed Summer 2012 in New York City.

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Happy Birthday Suit: Keira Knightley

Currently, Knightley resides at the top of my list of predicted 2012 Best Actress Oscar nominees (I will update the list on April 1st, seriously).  I'm still a little shaky, as the project sounds very experimental and could go either way, so I'm not confident that she'll win, more or less get nominated.  But, as of yet, she has the baitiest prospects, IMO.  For the longest time, I was blind to her appeal held by That Fellow.  She was adorable in Love Actually, but I didn't get her in general.  Constantly unimpressed with her choices, I finally got a glimpse at what she's capable of in last year's A Dangerous Method where she dove into the role of Russian-Jewish Sabina Spielrein, a wild-child who learns that her sexual impulses are connected to physical pain from her youth.  She is able to apply her lessons to becoming an accomplished psychiatrist.  But, the part is tricky, as she first had to adopt facial and vocal tricks, which, if not done carefully, can come across as unintentionally funny.  Some still found her turn affectatious.  I found her enthralling.

Knightley made her first big impression with Bend It Like Beckham, a small hit that featured her playing a talented football (soccer) player.  Perhaps taking a page out of Rachel Weisz' book, she joined the Pirates of the Caribbean (Weisz was one of the first award-winning actresses to build her career off of a popular action-comedy franchise), but, perhaps without the foresight it would be such a blockbuster and spawn several sequels.  The same year, she appeared as the cute-as a-button Juliet in the British ensemble moneymaker Love Actually.  Her next big budget feature, King Arthur, gravely disappointed commercially and critically.  And, unless Pirates is in the title or Joe Wright is behind the camera, audiences have passed on most of the rest of her films.  Despite a healthy British following, they often make barely a blip on the box-office radar.  She's played an assortment of characters including a decadent 18th-century aristocrat, a 1940s star-crossed lover, a supermodel turned bounty hunter, a reclusive actress, a housewife with questions about fidelity, and a jealous clone donor.  But, she really wouldn't up the ante until she joined forces with David Cronenberg with Method.

She first teamed up with director Wright in 2005, which proved to be fortuitous.  She scored her first AMPAS nod playing Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice.  They would come together again with Atonement, where she played a woman whose love is destroyed by a lie.  (She would also work twice with director John Maybury.)  The film received multiple award nominations, including Best Picture.  She's playing his Anna Karenina, set for release towards the end of the year.  She'll be working off of Oscar talk from last year involving her performance in Method.  Along with Karenina, she has made the bold choice of playing opposite Steve Carell in her most non-serious role yet.  In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, she'll be a comical foil in an end-of-the-world romance.  In December, she just may be looking at two Golden Globe nominations.  Tomorrow, she turns 27.

Previous Actress Retrospectives:

Keira giving all she has got

Jennifer Aniston     Drew Barrymore     Glenn Close     Jessica Biel     Juliette Binoche     Geena Davis     Jennifer Grey     Goldie Hawn     Holly Hunter     Keira Knightley     
Eva Mendes     Rosie O'Donnell     Lena Olin     Meg Ryan     Rachel Weisz

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