"Well, there you go. I've done my homework!" says actress Keira
Knightley, handing over a leather-bound Louis Vuitton journal. Inside
are pages and pages of immaculate, copperplate handwriting. Keira has
taken her recent Vogue assignment—writing a diary of her
escape to Africa—very seriously. "I got my flatmate to check all
the spelling," she adds.
In person, the Pirates of the Caribbean star exudes the peculiar
charm of a slightly scatty but ravishingly pretty British schoolgirl.
Just back from her African safari, she tumbles into London's Soho Hotel
on a cool spring afternoon. An oversize bag is falling off one spidery
arm, and a huge knitted coat is bunched up under the other. Her mahogany
tresses trail from a messy ponytail, and her black chiffon minidress is
a little askew. She is scruffily glamorous, in the vein of the classic
English rose at 22.
We are more used to seeing Keira Knightley swashbuckling her way through
tropical islands in her role as the feisty Elizabeth Swann than romping
in the Kenyan bush. (The third film in the franchise, Pirates of the
Caribbean: At World's End, hits multiplexes this month.) But she
took to the role of Vogue's African princess with equal spirit. I
open Keira's diary and read a few sentences: "Masai Mara is wide, green,
and beautiful. We're right on the border with Tanzania, and the sun is
shining. Cottar's 1920s Safari Camp is like something out of a fairy
tale. Totally in the wild. White tents, huge four-poster beds with
draped white mosquito nets. All the furniture is like something from
Out of Africa."
Curling her gangly legs beneath her in the armchair, Keira sips at a cup
of English breakfast tea while she recounts her adventures. Located in
the southeast of the Masai Mara, bordering the Serengeti and Loliondo
reserves, the safari is owned and run by Calvin Cottar, whose family
settled in East Africa in the early 1900s after hearing about Teddy
Roosevelt's adventures there. Dressed in regulation khaki, Cottar is
described as a Liam Neeson type who leaves female clients swooning when
he leads the game drives and presides over his old-style camp. Guests
are housed in huge white tents furnished with colonial antiques, Persian
rugs, and eccentric bric-a-brac. There are even several small Julian
Schnabel paintings of the camp's staff that the artist gave to Cottar
after staying there.
On her first day, Cottar took Keira on an early-morning game drive.
(They were also accompanied by Keira's current boyfriend. In true
movie-star style, she refers to him in code, as "Passepartout" in her
diary and "my traveling companion" when she talks about him. She never
uses his name, although regular readers of supermarket tabloids will
know he is the actor Rupert Friend.) Out on the Mara the group observed
a herd of elephants and "four lion cubs in a tree. I mean, it was
unbelievable…. These cubs were just flopped over these trees," says
Keira. She puts down her teacup for a moment and splays her hands and
legs in a cute impression of a baby lion.
During the day, Keira wrote her diary and read. She started The Day
of the Triffids, The Human Zoo, and Othello. She
didn't finish any of them. As the week went on, there were picnics in
rainstorms and Masai tribesmen dancing by firelight. Keira sunbathed and
slept, and in between obligingly posed for photographs. In the evenings,
everyone in the camp ate dinner together at a long wooden table in the
main tent. "The meals were very English, actually. We had prawn
cocktails, lamb, and roly-poly pudding," she says.
After three days of playing dress-up, Keira scribbled in her diary, "I
didn't think it would happen but it has. I'm in love with a
white-and-cream Marc Jacobs dress. Oh, the pain of true love." As an
actress whose looks and frame lend themselves to period costume, Keira
was understandably drawn to the most historically inspired, feminine
clothes on the shoot. She adored wearing the Louis Vuitton corset-style
bathing suit, the gigantic silk ball skirt by Thakoon, and the
1930s-style rose-print sundress by Comme des Garçons. But the
pièce de résistance was the white ruffled Peter Som gown,
which exuded the romance of colonial chic.
In her other life as a movie star, Keira falls for the fashion as much
as the roles. For the upcoming Atonement, in which she plays the
heroine, Cecilia Tallis, Keira wore "absolutely incredible clothes. The
beautiful thirties ones were actually made for me." From the novel by
Ian McEwan, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, the film features
a cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave and James McAvoy. You get the
sense from Keira that this movie, filmed last summer in a grand, stately
home in Shropshire, England, is her work crush of the year. "I loved
it," she says. "It's very bleak…it's beautiful."
After lunch at the Giraffe Manor, a hotel near Nairobi where giraffes
roam the grounds, Keira donned a chic gray Bottega Veneta frock to visit
the baby elephants at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Mbagathi,
the only successful project in the world at rehabilitating orphaned
elephants into the wild. Her diary entry for that day reads, "Today
everyone tried to catch the baby elephants so we could put Louis Vuitton
blankets on their backs. I've never seen anything more brilliantly
stupid. I hope Louis Vuitton like it; they should definitely give the
elephant a modeling contract."
When it comes to traveling for fun, Keira has barely had time to go on
vacation since she was sixteen. In fact, there have been precisely two
holidays—aside from that, she's been working continually. Home in
London for only a few weeks, Keira next heads off to Wales to film
The Best Time of Our Lives with Sienna Miller. The movie, about
Dylan Thomas's women, was written by Keira's mother, Sharman Macdonald.
With so much location-hopping, it's not surprising that Keira craves
home most of all. Her English life is simple: shopping at Borough Market
and learning to cook from her flatmates—her brother, Caleb, and his
girlfriend, fashion designer Kerry Nixon of the menswear label Vidler
+ Nixon. But mainly when she's home, she relaxes by being
unavailable. Her mobile phone "doesn't really get answered a lot. I
don't like talking on the phone, which is a nightmare because my mum
does." Her BlackBerry had a short life. "I chucked it in the sea when I
was working in the Bahamas doing Pirates, so it's in the ocean
there somewhere." With a pang of guilt about the environment, she then
adds, "I didn't mean to. Actually, no, I did mean to…. I did
actually go back and try and find it, but I was in a fit of 'I don't
want to be contacted. Leave me alone.' "
"The Chronicles of Keira" has been edited for Style.com; the complete
story appears in the June 2007 issue of Vogue.
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