Keira Knightley: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

1. Georgiana Cavendish - The Duchess (2008)

Considering Knightley's life-long affinity with period drama, it's no surprise that her best performance would come in this genre. It's easy to dismiss the genre as one obsessed with nothing deeper than pretty dresses and dancing, but The Duchess is a film for confounding those expectations. It's also the film, following on from our introduction, that convinced Mr. Kermode that there was something to Ms. Knightley after all. Lavishly directed by Saul Dibb, The Duchess tells the story of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire during the late-18th century. Georgiana is a much-loved and highly influential public figure, rubbing shoulders with the most powerful people in British fashion and politics. After her grim husband (Ralph Fiennes) begin an affair, she makes the fateful mistake of responding in kind by courting the future Prime Minister Charles Grey. When The Duchess was released, comparison were drawn between Georgiana's predicament and that of Princess Diana: both were much-loved figures with blue blood who had extramarital affairs. From a purely cinematic point of view, Dibb's film knocks Oliver Hirschbiegel's Diana into a cocked hat, but its success rests just as much on Knightley's performance. Going toe-to-toe with Ralph Fiennes is no easy task, but she manages it with a performance which manages to find light, joy and dignity in her predicament, no matter how awful said predicament becomes. It's a role that she was born to play, and a performance she has yet to better. Having sung Keira's praises, let's now look at 5 performances in which she truly was Ikea...