LONDON -- Keira Knightley, the world's most ravishing tomboy, wears her stardom "like a loose garment."

This according to Joe Wright, director of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, the new romantic Second World War epic in which garments, glamour and the fictionalization of facts all merit memorable portions of screen time.

The latter is a timely topic, one assumes, for the 22-year-old, given her white-hot celebrity status and the thunderous media frenzy it arrives with. Then again, maybe not.

"Fame is not something that's ever interested me," Knightley tells Sun Media when Wright's comments are relayed to her. "I was never allowed to read (celebrity) magazines, so it's never been a culture that's been part of my life. It's not something I've ever aspired to be."

Regardless, she has achieved it, thanks to back-to-back breakout roles in Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean. And while one might argue if you don't want to be famous, you shouldn't sign onto Jerry Bruckheimer franchises, Knightley counters, "Nobody thought (Pirates) was going to work. There are millions of those films with a young British girl that don't work."

Since then, and perhaps as a bit of cinematic contrition for becoming a superstar because of a Disney-theme ride, Knightley has amassed a varied, uneven body of work -- from the ambitious but disastrous Domino to Wright's acclaimed Pride & Prejudice, for which she won an Oscar nomination. All along, she has sought to establish credibility as an actress, something that doesn't necessarily arrive with fame.

"I think I was very much dismissed (after Bend It Like Beckham). I was 16 and was required to play football in a film that was lovely, but I didn't have to beat myself up everyday. I was very aware I hadn't proved I could act at all."

With Atonement, Knightley is front and centre of yet another awards-bound juggernaut, this one based on the novel by British author Ian McEwan. It opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Friday, then in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa and Winnipeg on Dec. 21.

In it, Knightley and James McAvoy star as Cecilia and Robbie, young lovers in the 1930s doomed by class, war and a false accusation made by her younger sister, Briony. Yet it almost didn't happen this way. Wright admits he originally couldn't envision Knightley as the aloof but sensual Cecilia.

"I still had in my mind the girl who played Elizabeth Bennett. I imagined Keira as Briony, to be honest. Keira was like 19 when we made Pride."

He changed his mind after meeting Knightley months later at Pride & Prejudice's premiere during the Toronto International Film Festival.

Long and lithe in a designer dress, Knightley suddenly looked "like a proper woman," Wright says, "and I suddenly realized she was changing and I felt it was a great privilege to capture that change ... She's a very brave actress -- maybe because the kind of stardom thing has come to her quite early and easily."

Or at least more easily than it does for some others.

In speaking to Knightley, it's apparent she's not so much angered by the intrusive, endless stories churned out about her -- "It's almost like a fictional version of myself" -- but puzzled, even confounded, by the public's appetite for them.

In the 1930s, the era in which Atonement unfolds, movie stars were larger-than-life, even untouchable, she notes. "Back then we were allowed our fantasies and they didn't have to be sordid and that's kind of the place stars were in. If you read biographies about your Ava Gardners and Bette Davises, they were all alcoholic messes as all actors are meant to be.

"Today, we want a perfection and yet we want to prove it's impossible ... You have to break down the facade, which I always think is ridiculous because isn't the whole point the facade? If I wanted reality, I'd be reading newspapers -- I wouldn't be reading about actors and actresses."