Knightley: It's time to 'chill out'

Keira Knightley has realised it is time to "just chill out".

The star, promoting her latest movie Atonement, told the Sunday Telegraph that she is taking a break after finishing work on that movie and Pirates of the Caribbean.

She was previously frightened into overworking to keep her career alive, she said: "Bend It Like Beckham came out when I was 17, and I only saw about two reviews, but they both said, 'She's pretty but she can't act for sh*t.'

"It's only when I look back on it that I realise how much it really did affect me, because I didn't have very much self-confidence. You already feel unsure of yourself, and then you see your worst fears in print.

"It really knocked me - which is why, I think, I was working, working, working, because I was trying to run away from the fact that I thought I couldn't do it."

But Knightley said she recently had a moment of realisation that she was putting too much in.

"It was seeing that my friend's hair had grown, it was literally that simple," she recalled. "It felt like yesterday we'd been at school, but actually it had been four years, and I hadn't been at her last four birthdays.

"Then I realised, f- it, life's short, what are you doing, and if the work stops, it stops - there's always something else. Just chill out."