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Keira Knightley tells ELLE she’d discourage her kids from acting

ELLE cover star Keira Knightley was told she was s**t, anorexic and that everyone hated her. Nice!

Growing up in the public eye is tough – just ask Keira Knightley. The cover star of ELLE’s July issue – which those of you with a subscription to the magazine should have already received - has said that if she had a daughter she wouldn’t want her to go down the same career path.

"Oh, 100 per cent, I'd absolutely tell her not to," she tells ELLE magazine. "I would 150 million trillion per cent be totally discouraging of [her] doing anything like that. I think you need to be, actually, because if the kid is going to do that then they have to do it on their own. And I would say teenage years should be done privately. You should be going out and getting unbelievably drunk, getting into ridiculous situations, making mistakes. That's what that time of life is about and we should do that privately, one million trillion zillion per cent."

She adds: "Saying that, I don't regret it - I wouldn't do my life any differently. But having lived through it... there was a very long time when [interviewers] were all, 'Well, you're a s**t actress and you're anorexic and people hate you', which - for a teenager or somebody in their early 20s - is a very strange thing."

It’s not all bad though, she married Klaxons singer James Righton last year in a private ceremony. At the time everyone was surprised to see Knightley donning a dress she’d previously worn in public. What we didn’t know though is that a second ceremony was held, during which she wore a Valentino dress.

"I wore it for the ceremony we had just for our friends, in a wood, because you have to have flowers on a dress in a wood," she says.

Knightley is the face of one of the world’s most famous design houses – Chanel. She recalls the first time she met Karl Lagerfeld: "I didn't know I was meeting him, and I was so jet-lagged I didn't know what was going on," the Chanel spokeswoman dished. "I was in jeans and had acne—you know the kind where nothing is going to cover it—so I put a hat on. I remember somebody making a [negative] comment about it and I just thought [whispers], ‘I'm wearing a hat because I've got acne.'"

Subscribe and save on an ELLE magazine subscription today. Posted by Amy Power.

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