Keira Knightley Wants More Female Voices In Hollywood

Keira Knightley in Violet magazine via Style.com Photo: Violet

Keira Knightley has a powerful message for Hollywood, and she isn’t afraid to share it. In her recent cover story with cult-favourite British magazine Violet (helmed by her personal stylist Leith Clark), the Oscar-nominated actress opened up about the deafening lack of women’s stories in Hollywood.

“Where are the female stories? Where are they?” Knightley told British actress-and-model-turned-photographer Amanda de Cadenet in the interview, Style.com reports. “Where are the directors, where are the writers? It’s imbalanced, so given that we are half the cinema-going public, we are half the people [who] watch drama or watch anything else, where is that?”

“I don’t know what happened through the ‘80s, ‘90s and ‘00s that took feminism off the table, that made it something that women weren’t supposed to identify with and were supposed to be ashamed of.”

“Feminism is about the fight for equality between the sexes, with equal respect, equal pay and equal opportunity. At the moment we are still a long way off that.”

Women have always struggled to get their voices heard in the traditionally masculine realm of Hollywood. For every 15 male directors, there is only one female director, and only 4% of the top 100 grossing films of the last decade were directed by women, according to a study by the University of Southern California.

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The 30-year old actress – who is also expecting her first child with husband James Righton – also spoke about her character Joan Clarke’s struggles with sexism in The Imitation Game. “I think it is interesting that for women in film the problems they face are generally put into the sphere of home and family and not into the workplace. Joan’s real struggles were to get her rightful ‘place at the table’, and then once she was there, equal pay, which she never came close to.”

Knightley’s comments come at the same time as female-led films dominate the U.S box office, with Cinderella, Insurgent and Fifty Shades of Grey enjoying the three biggest openings of the year.

Is Hollywood finally paying attention to women’s stories, or is there more work to be done?

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