Keira Knightley Reveals One of Her Daughters Is Dyslexic in Rare Update: Her Memory Is ‘Amazing’
Keira Knightley revealed she shares a special trait with one of her two daughters.
While speaking about how she finds sight-reading to be “really hard” with dyslexia on the Monday, August 5, episode of the “Ruthie’s Table 4” podcast, Knightley noted that she and her husband, James Righton, “have a dyslexic kid.”
“It really bounces. But I listen to it. Basically, I record it and listen to it and listen to it and listen to it, and that’s how I learn it,” she said.
“She’s doing the same thing,” Knightley continued of her child. “It’s absolutely amazing.” Righton, 40, chimed in, adding, “She’ll look at books. She’ll memorize the book, basically. It’s amazing.”
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The couple, who wed in 2013, did not specify whether they were referring to their 9-year-old daughter, Edie, or 4-year-old, Delilah.
On the podcast, Knightley credited her dyslexia diagnosis for helping her become an actress. “The school said, ‘Well look, she can’t read at all, and we need a carrot to dangle in front of her. So, do you know if there’s something she wants?’” she stated. “And [my parents] said, ‘Well, she wants an agent.”
Knightley continued: “It was always, ‘If you read, if your grades go up, you’re allowed to keep on acting. But If they go down, then it stops.’ It did go up, though. It was a carrot!”
Knightley and Righton welcomed their first child two years after they tied the knot. “The love thing is astonishing. It's a very primal, primal love. That's quite extraordinary,” she told Elle of becoming a mother in August 2015. “And the ability to have no sleep and continue going. It's not pleasant—I never thought that I could actually do it for the amount of time that I've done it.”
She went on to note that developed a new appreciation for her body after giving birth. “As a woman, you hate certain parts of your body. You go through those periods where you look in the mirror and you think, ‘Oh, if only I had different legs or arms,’ or whatever,” she explained. “You go through pregnancy and labor and then feeding the kid and you go, ‘Wow, my body is totally amazing, and I'm never going to not like it again, because it did this, and this is fucking extraordinary.’”
After debuting her baby bump at a May 2019 Chanel party in Paris, Knightley and Righton welcomed their second child that September.
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The pair have primarily kept their children out of the spotlight over the years, though Knightley occasionally shares details of her family’s private life in interviews. “Any actresses out there, do not move the child from the cot to the bed when you’re just about to play a lead role in a film that has a lot of words in it because remembering the is quite tricky,” she said of sleep-training Edie while filming Official Secrets in an August 2019 interview with the Associated Press. “I felt very on edge.’
While quarantining at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Knightley established a fun rule that her daughters could only wear dresses while bouncing on a trampoline in their garden. “I put on red lipstick every day and every bit of Chanel that I have in my cupboard, and my daughter Edie had Chanel ribbons plaited into her hair and fairy wings,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in June 2021. “I thought, ‘What is the point of these lovely things sitting in the wardrobe when it feels quite apocalyptic and scary outside?’"
