Keira Knightley: 'Missing university makes me feel stupid'
www.dailymail.co.uk - 2nd Aug 2008
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Even the most dedicated university students may have dreamt of swapping essays and books for a life as a Hollywood star.
But after bringing some of literature's most famous heroines alive on the big screen Keira Knightley has revealed how she envies her contemporaries who have university degrees.
The Oscar-nominated star of Atonement and Pride and Prejudice said missing out on university has left her 'with a chip on her shoulder' and she hopes to prove herself to be brainy by reading more.
In an interview with Tatler magazine the 23-year-old said: 'I am completely uneducated.
'Not going to university did give me an incredible driving force because it leaves you with a slight chip on your shoulder.
'It makes me feel I am going to read absolutely everything so I can prove I am not stupid.'
Although Knightley was diagnosed with dyslexia aged six and is only able to read slowly, her current reading list includes Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.
She is also working her way through a biography of Albert Speer, the man known as the first architect of the Third Reich, and a history of the Vietnam War.
Knightley dropped out of school at 17, before taking her A-levels, after landing a role in a television adaptation of Doctor Zhivago.
In the same year she got her big break in Bend It Like Beckham and went on to star as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice in 2005
This year she starred as Dylan Thomas's lover Vera Phillips in The Edge of Love.
Knightley will next be on screen as scandalous 18th century aristocrat Georgiana, in The Duchess - an adaptation of Amanda Foreman's best-selling biography of the Duchess of Devonshire.
Knightley said: 'I saw Georgiana as this courageous person who was in a marriage that was like a cage dropped top of her, forcing her to fight her way out. The film is also partly about the power of female manipulation, which was then a woman's only weapon.'
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