When Keira Knightley was in Washington, D.C., last year, promoting her schoolgirl soccer movie, Bend It Like Beckham, she and co-star Parminder Nagra were invited to a soccer match between two professional women's teams. The event gave Knightley an abrupt lesson in cultural differences between Great Britain and the United States. "I go to a lot of football games, right?" says the fine-boned 18-year-old. "There's a lot of swearing, there's a lot of drunken men. But this one was six-year-old girls in party frocks, waving little flags. I remember the referee did something crap, and I was like"—Knightley begins bellowing—'"Oi, ref! Come on!' The shocked looks on those little girls' faces ..."

The femme-centric gentility of the U.S. soccer scene may have perplexed Knightley, but it was surely the key factor in the breakout American success of Bend It Like Beckham. In turn, Knightley's portrayal of the coltish, pouting ballpark prodigy Jules Paxton won her a place in the Starlet Most Likely league. To use another soccer term, Knightley had an open-goal opportunity, which she duly converted by starring opposite Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the rollicking goofball epic that hauled in such impressive box-office booty last summer.

While Keira Knightley starts to reap the rewards of being a top Hollywood draft pick, she seems intent on ignoring entire chapters in the Manual of Starlet Behavior. For instance, she is negotiating the hazardous straits of junior celebrity with neither manager nor personal publicist to hold her hand. Knightley is currently billeted in her mother's native Glasgow, for the making of The Jacket, a metaphysical thriller that has already—thanks to the involvement of producer George Clooney and star Adrien Brody—generated considerable tabloid ink in the U.K. Yet even as Knightley mingles in such exalted company, she lacks a professional mouthpiece, and is obliged to personally deny press speculation about a romance between her and Brody. In order to confirm a meeting with the actress, one must talk to her visiting mother, a helpful, soft-spoken lady with a profound aversion to being quoted in the press.

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Knightley, you see, does not even have a personal assistant, the functionary whom most of her peers regard as essential as air and water. "A lot of people have said, You've got to get an assistant, you've got to get this, you've got to get that," says Knightley, nursing a cappuccino in the basement bar of one of Glasgow's boutique hotels. "But part of me is going, You're 18—this is when you're meant to be growing up and handling things on your own.

"If I got an assistant now, I think my growing up would stop at 18, and that kind of terrifies me. I'm the laziest cow in the world—I wouldn't do anything."

"VERY FEW PEOPLE HAVE CHATTED ME UP MAYBE I'M JUST A SAD PERSON AND I DON'T SIT AT ENOUGH BARS."

Even when it comes to something as basic as soccer, Knightley seems incapable of fulfilling stereotypes. The young show people of London are expected to swear allegiance to one of the country's three glamour teams: Manchester United, Arsenal, or Chelsea. Yet, like her father before her, Keira Knightley follows West Ham United, a working-class club of rich tradition and shallow purse. Her big brown eyes grow misty when she recalls her attendance at West Ham's final three home games of last season, which saw the club demoted from England's Premiership league into the second-tier "Division One." "They've got all these great players," she intones. "But they looked like a bunch of people who couldn't be bothered. It was like watching a bunch of schoolkids."

Keira Knightley was raised in a section  of London far distant, in terms both geographical and social, from the East End home of her favorite soccer team. Knightley's parents were both actors who, despite their irregular employment, managed to acquire a three-bedroom house in Richmond upon Thames, a stoutly bourgeois West London borough. When the Knightleys had a son in 1979, the family's financial circumstances strongly suggested that he would be an only child.

"I THINK I ALWAYS DISAPPOINT PEOPLE. BECAUSE THEY ALWAYS EXPECT SOMEONE VERY PRETTY, VERY done.

"I was born on a bet," Keira states cheerfully. "My dad said to my mum, 'If you sell a script, we can have another child.' She wrote a play called When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout, and she won various awards for it. And I was the child."

And a precocious child at that. At the age of three, little Keira asked her parents for an agent, and she finally got one at six, as a reward for working to overcome her dyslexia. Knightley cites "younger-child syndrome" as the source of her premature ambition, admitting that as a little girl she was every bit as serious as she sounds: "My mum says I was born at 40 and I'm working my way down."

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Knightley's mother, Sharman Macdonald, is now an established playwright, and she brings her work with her when she accompanies her daughter on her travels. Knightley—who calls her mother "Shar"—still stays at the family home when she's in London, although she takes home some guilty baggage along with her laundry. "It's not really fair on my parents," says Knightley. "I've got so much stuff, piles and piles of everything. And as soon as I get there, it looks like a bomb site.

"I did actually try to buy a flat in London before I came here," she offers. "But it fell through at the last moment, and I kind of think that's quite good." During her stint in Glasgow, Knightley is staying in a rented apartment. "I'm not good in hotels," she explains.

Although Knightley has been acting professionally since the age of seven, her parents' trepidation over her career choice has not gone unheeded. For instance, after filming Bend It Like Beckham, Knightley—a straight-A student—was planning to return to college and lined up a summer job at a local skateboard shop.

"Mum and Dad were actors," she says. "So it's always been: you do a job and then you go back to the end of the line. And then you work your way up the line. You always have to be prepared for the times you'll be out of work. If you have five years of working constantly, that's beyond lucky. I didn't go into this with fairy-tale notions of arriving in Hollywood and the streets' being paved with gold."

As it turned out, Knightley's arrival in Hollywood was every bit the modern-day fairy tale. Before Bend It Like Beckham was released in the U.S., Gore Verbinski, the director of Pirates of the Caribbean, summoned Knightley to Los Angeles on the strength of a casting director's tape; he passed her on to the film's producer, action-movie mogul Jerry Bruckheimer, who signed her up for his $125 million enterprise. "There are a lot of beautiful girls around the world," Bruckheimer avers. "But the problem is, they can't turn off who they are when the camera turns on. Keira is very natural in front of the camera—when she becomes the character, you don't see any of the acting wheels turning."

As Elizabeth Swann, the willful and haughty governor's daughter in Pirates of the Caribbean, Knightley does double duty, providing earnest ballast—"I really must protest!"—for Johnny Depp's giddy turn as the Keith Richards of the seven seas, and furnishing apple-cheeked junior lead Orlando Bloom with a comely romantic foil. Knightley is at pains to point out that the latter function would have been less credible without the help of the makeup woman who spent 45 minutes each morning enhancing her cleavage. (Since the actress was only 17 when that film was shot, male film critics understandably tended to tap-dance around her physical attributes.)

When Knightley's agent first told her about Pirates of the Caribbean, she shared the rest of the world's skepticism about a movie built around a Disney theme-park ride—until she heard that Johnny Depp was involved. Knightley met Depp at a script readthrough in his L.A. club, the Viper Room. "His mouth was already full of all those gold and platinum teeth," recalls Knightley. "I just shouted, 'Oh my God—look at your teeth!' That kind of broke the ice."

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Given her blatant lack of Cool Starlet Persona, it is perhaps understandable that Knightley feels no gravitational pull toward the center of the show-business universe. "I love to visit L.A., but I couldn't live there," she says. "As an actor you're supposed to be simulating reality, and L.A. is based on unreality. Personally, I don't know how I could 'grow artistically' in a place like that.

"Anyway, I couldn't handle the rejection. If you're walking around L.A. you're seeing all these perfect people and you start to think, I've got to be like that. I'll have to be much stronger before I go over there, I think."

If Keira Knightley's combination of outsider attitude and sultry looks brings to mind the young Winona Ryder, or any subsequent starlet of the "free spirit" school, it should be stated that this English actress is of an entirely different kidney. For starters, Knightley confidently maintains eye contact at all times during conversation, and never once brings up her pets and how "totally human" they are; there is no talk of "auras," being a "very spiritual person," or even yoga; and her agenda does not appear to include any newfound interest in environmentalism or magical-realist novels.

Nor does Knightley seem to evince the desperate yen for hipster credibility that is prevalent among her peers. So impoverished is her knowledge of popular music, it is extremely unlikely that she will end up dating a Stroke or a White Stripe. She recently asked her friends for lists of their Top 10 albums so that she could buy them up in an effort to acquire some basic pop-cultural grounding. During her teenage years, the actress's bedroom walls were adorned not by posters of boy bands or grunge rockers but by a single picture of Emma Thompson.

Knightley's drama-geek side lives on, judging by her vocal enthusiasm for Jennifer Jason Leigh, the ultimate actress's actress, who is featured alongside her in The Jacket. Although the film is one of several eminently solid projects on Knightley's slate—including a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel—she retains a distinctly actuarial approach to her craft. So strong was her feeling that she would be fired from her current movie, she brought only one week's worth of clothes to Scotland.

Knightley plucked The Jacket from the pile of same-ish scripts that came her way after Pirates of the Caribbean—"Pretty girl in corset gets into trouble, love story, blah blah blah," she says. When The Jacket director John Maybury (whose last film was the art-house gem Love Is the Devil) hesitated to hire Knightley for the part of a Gulf War veteran's wife from Vermont, she understood perfectly. "I'd been doing very English Rose, 'I'm pretty' roles," says Knightley, accentuating her demure innocence. "They didn't want that in this film. John told me, 'I don't know if you can do it or not.'

"I love that—you get a lot of bullshit in this industry, but John said what was on his mind. I'm not good when people go, 'You're amazing, you're perfect for this role.' I think you've really got to fight for stuff." Knightley pauses momentarily. "Although a bit of gushing now and then isn't bad ... "

Keira Knightley will next grace the multiplexes in this summer's King Arthur, a broadswords-and-breastplates epic that promises a new and demystifying but nonetheless hyperviolent take on a British folk myth so well-worn that The Hollywood Reporter has deemed its protagonist a "brand name." (There will be no industrial light and magic from Merlin this time around, since Arthurian scholar John Matthews was hired to vouchsafe the film's historical authenticity.) Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Antoine Fuqua (veteran of Training Day and countless MTV videos), King Arthur features in the titular role Clive Owen (Croupier), with Knightley playing a Guinevere who is significantly tougher than her willowy big-screen forebears.

Since Knightley had previously made repeated pleas that her Pirates of the Caribbean character be given at least one swordfighting scene, she was more than gratified by the butchness of the Guinevere role. "I got to use swords and knives and axes and garrotes and bows and arrows," Knightley raves. "It was great! This isn't a corseted, pouty part—it's very real, very earthy." Guinevere's wardrobe consists, she says, of "a floaty dress, rags, and an interesting leather concoction which is a bit Conan the Barbarian."

Knightley prepared for King Arthur with three months of intensive physical training under Ed Chow, the man who chiseled Angelina Jolie into shape for the Tomb Raider movies, and she continued to pump herself up during the film's five-month shooting schedule in Ireland. "I've seen pictures of myself and I'm big," says Knightley. "You can see proper muscles. I kept thinking, O.K., if they've put me on steroids and I haven't found out yet ...

"It's really strange realizing how you can manipulate your body so much in a comparatively short space of time. It freaked me out because it didn't feel like me anymore—the shape was completely different. It felt like I could use the body; it felt like it was doing what it should be doing—but it also felt really unnatural. I was going, Who the fuck is that?"

Knightley's body has now returned to a form that is, by her own harsh appraisal, someway short of industry expectation. "I think I always disappoint people. Because they always expect someone very pretty, very done. And ... " To illustrate the disappointment she wreaks, Knightley runs her hands down her non-curvaceous frame, highlighting as well a college-student outfit of faded black V-necked T-shirt and nondescript jeans, which are rolled up to accommodate black snow boots of the Ugg genus.

Sure, Knightley's dark-brown locks might not be red-carpet-ready this afternoon, and her purple nail polish may be girlishly misapplied in places. She may even chew the same little piece of gum through three successive cups of cappuccino. But let's get real here: while self-deprecation is an admirable trait, the girl is an utter knockout; she is gorgeous, a sex symbol in the making. The gushing should probably end there—we are, after all, still talking about an 18-year-old.

Or just one more gush: "That face!" exclaims Penny Rose, costume designer on both Pirates of the Caribbean and King Arthur. "People just stop and jaws open. But Keira is completely unaware of being a beauty."

Not everyone feels inhibited by the tender age that accompanies that beauty. A female production staffer who has worked with Knightley reports being overwhelmed with inquiries about the actress from sportsmen and fellow actors. As Jerry Bruckheimer reveals, "A lot of my friends say, 'Oh my God, when can we meet Keira?"' And who knows—Bruckheimer's buddies may even have a shot at buying Knightley a nonalcoholic drink, because she insists that men rarely try to pick her up. "Maybe it's because I'm too thick to realize," says Knightley, "but very few people have chatted me up. Maybe I'm just a sad person and I don't sit at enough bars. But that's O.K.— I've got time."