Keira Knightley returns this week in Silent Night, a holiday-themed comedy horror movie co-starring Matthew Goode – how can you resist? Ahead of its premiere Friday (December 3) on AMC+, here are some things you might not know about the Oscar-nominated actress we love for always speaking her mind.
1. She's named after Kira Ivanova, a Russian figure skater her father was a fan of.
She was actually meant to be called Kiera, an Anglicized version of Kira, but her mother misspelled it on the birth certificate.
2. She comes from an acting family. 
Her father Will Knightley is an actor whose TV credits include Midsomer Murders, Rosemary & Thyme, and EastEnders, while her mother Sharman Macdonald is an actor-turned-writer. Macdonald's screenwriting credits include The Winter Guest – a 1997 movie directed by Alan Rickman and starring Emma Thompson – and Knightley's 2008 movie The Edge of Love.
3. She was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was six.
"I am a slow reader. I always loved words, which is a strange thing given that I couldn't actually read them. By the time I was 11, they deemed me to have got over it sufficiently," Knightley told The Independent in 2015.
However, she still isn't able to sight-read. "If you gave me something and said, 'Read it out loud,' there is something that happens that I can't really do that," Knightley added.
4. She also got her first acting agent when she was six.
However, her parents only allowed her to take on work during the summer vacation. "I wasn't allowed to do commercials. I wasn't allowed to do TV series. I wasn't allowed to do soaps or basically anything that would mean I missed too much school," Knightley told The Independent.
Knightley's parents also used her acting career as a way of motivating her at school. "The headteacher told them: 'Get her to do it but tell her she is not allowed to do it unless the grades go up.' That was the first thing. If I dropped a grade, I wasn't allowed to go up for auditions. It was that that led to the getting over [of the dyslexia] and starting to read and working very hard," Knightley recalled.
5. She can play 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head'... on her teeth.
Yes, really. She demonstrated this pretty unique musical talent during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show.
6. Becoming very famous at a young age had a profound impact on her mental health.
At one point, Knightley didn't leave her house for three months and had to undergo hypnotherapy before attending the BAFTA Film Awards. "I did have a mental breakdown at 22, so I did take a year off there and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of all of that stuff," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "I went deep into therapy and all of that, and she [the therapist] said, ‘It’s amazing – I normally come in here and have people that think people are talking about them and they think that they’re being followed, but actually they’re not. You’re the first person that actually that is happening to!'” 
7. Director Joe Wright banned her from pouting on the set of Pride and Prejudice.
However, a solitary Knightley pout still made it into the movie’s final cut, as she recalled on The Graham Norton Show.
8. Her husband James Righton was the keyboard player in British indie band Klaxons.
Klaxons were leading lights in the so-called "new rave" scene of the late noughties – check out their signature hit "Golden Skans" below.
9. In 2007, she sued British newspaper the Daily Mail for libel and won.
The newspaper had used a photo of Knightley misleadingly in an article about a young woman who died from an eating disorder. According to the BBC, the newspaper's lawyer said at the time: "The defendant accepts that the claimant does not bear responsibility for [the young woman]'s death, does not have an eating disorder, and has not misled the public." Knightley donated her damages to an eating disorder charity.
10. She attributes her honesty to having what she calls a "f**k it" button.|
And apparently it was this button that got pushed when Knightley wrote The Weaker Sex, an incredibly candid essay on femininity and motherhood that she contributed to the 2018 book Feminists Don't Wear Pink (and Other Lies). "It’s always going to be there. It gets pushed in the characters that I play who might be unlikeable and horrific," Knightley told Stylist. "And then that essay was also a sort of ‘Oh f**k it’ button. One day it’ll really bite me in the ass."
Have we missed something interesting about Keira Knightley?