Knightley isn’t keen on playing the muse
LOS ANGELES— Locked in a room in Paris and forced to write a scandalous bestseller?
Allow Keira Knightley to introduce you to the story of Colette, a new biopic opening next Friday.
The actress makes a movie star of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the avant-garde French author who ghost-wrote under her husband’s name to uncharted success at the turn of the century.
After wresting free of her marriage and fighting for the rights to her work, Colette would go on to literary icon status, penning the 1920 novel Chéri and 1944’s Gigi, the latter adapted into a movie musical that won nine Oscars in 1959, including best picture.
Don’t know her story? Neither did Knightley, 33, until she picked up the Colette script.
“I just feel like there’s a sense that we don’t know our history. We don’t know who our heroes are and were,” says the actress. “There are some amazing women in history, and they should be taught.”
Together, Colette and her notorious, showman-like author husband Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as “Willy” and played by Dominic West) were the toast of Paris. Privately, Willy would lock his young wife in a room until she turned over pages of work; their marriage became open, Colette fell in love with women and Willy dabbled in his own affairs.
Their power dynamic, too, began to shift with the success of their Claudine collaboration, a suggestive series of novels charting a girl coming of age in the French countryside. (The sensual nature of Claudine in- spired a populist craze comparable to Fifty Shades of Grey.)
After their split, Colette became a sensation in her own right and was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1948.
Such themes are all too familiar to Knightley.
“With female actresses and directors, there’s often this narrative I’ve always found pretty offensive,” she says. “Which is this Svengali-type creature with these sort of puppet-like women who do exactly what they’re told.
“I’ve been trapped in that before. Not necessarily with how I’ve been treated on set, because actually most of my experiences with directors have been hugely collaborative, but just in the kind of cultural dialogue around them,” Knightley says. “It’s been, ‘Oh, she’s the muse,’ which always obviously has a kind of sexual connotation to it (and then he) brings out this amazing talent.”
In her own work, Knightley says she has tried to avoid playing second fiddle. “If I wasn’t playing the lead, then I wanted the character to be well-rounded and not simply be supportive or sexual.” She shrugs with a half-smile. “They don’t come around all the time.”
Next, Knightley stars in Disney’s fantastical The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (in theatres Nov. 2) as the feathery voiced Sugar Plum Fairy, a character who “is the personification of femininity in a very pink, obnoxious way,” she chuckles.