Keira Knightley has been slammed as not being ugly enough to play certain historic figures because the twee thespian look more like a frail English Rose and less like the “back end of a bus.”
There’s a lot of hard graft involved in the acting game. Just ask Keira Knightley. On one hand, you can be too porky and plain looking to serve justice to the role. The next moment, the Hollywood glamour and charisma, which exudes from the same pores which once sweated as profusely as a pig at feeding time, reeks of the overwhelming perfume of inauthenticity
Being called too pretty for a role is a strange sort of insult, but that’s exactly what Bletchley Park veteran Lady Jean Fforde has accused Kiera Knightley off in her portrayal of Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game.
Although Knightley was nominated an Oscar nomination for her stint as the Bletchley Park codebreaker, according to Lady Jean Fforde, who worked with Clarke and Alan Turing at Bletchley Park , Kiera was not pig ugly enough to really play the character with any conviction.
“Clarke was nothing like Keira. An absolute back end of a bus. Blessed woman, though.”
According to the Telegraph this little nugget of information was revealed by Tessa Dunlop who was speaking at the Hay Festival yesterday.
Dunlop was one of 15 Bletchley Park veterans interviewed by Fforde for her book, The Bletchley Girls: War, Secrecy, Love and Loss , and the author admitted it was a lengthy process.
“It’s very difficult to find very old people because they are not on Twitter. They don’t feel the need to splurge everything online.”
Yet they obviously watch movies, and for Lady Jean Fforde, Kiera Knightley’s waif-like frame, big doe eyes, and chiselled cheekbones just didn’t cut the mustard when it came to playing her plum ugly code-breaking friend.
[Image By Ethan Miller/Getty Images]
