Keira Knightley’s breakdown helped her cope with motherhood.
The 33-year-old actress has admitted that she struggled to cope with being a new mother at first when she welcomed her daughter Edie with husband James Righton in 2015 but believes that suffering a breakdown at the age of 22, when she first found fame, and the resulting therapy, helped her to deal with it.
She told The Guardian: "Your body just created life and now it’s shifting in order to feed it. That’s monumental and we’re all expected to go: ‘Oh no, all good, I’m groovy – I haven’t slept, I’m fine. That I’m able to forgive myself for not being brilliant [as a parent] every f**king day is probably because of that breakdown."
‘Colette’ actress Keira also hit out at how women are portrayed in society, saying that they are forced to be "sexy" or a "virgin-mother".
She said: "Before motherhood, you’re sexy, but if we talk about the whole vagina-splitting thing then that’s terrifying; there’s no sex there, so what we do is go into the virgin-mother retrofit, that’s nice and safe. The problem with those two images is I think very few women actually identify with them. Women are meant to play the flirt or the mother in order to get their voice heard. I can’t. It makes me feel sick.
"They tell me what it is to be a woman. Be nice, be supportive, be pretty but not too pretty, be thin but not too thin, be sexy but not too sexy, be successful but not too successful. … But I don’t want to flirt and mother them, flirt and mother, flirt and mother. I don’t want to flirt with you because I don’t want to f**k you, and I don’t want to mother you because I am not your mother. … I just want to work, mate. Is that OK? Talk and be heard, be talked to and listen. Male ego. Stop getting in the way."
Keira Knightley’s breakdown helped her cope with motherhood
