Keira Knightley’s Best Quotes About Parenting 2 Children: Motherhood Is ‘Quite Extraordinary’

Credit: Sonia Recchia/WireImage

Keira Knightley's Best Quotes About Parenting 2 Children: Motherhood Is 'Quite Extraordinary'

Real talk! Keira Knightley became a mom in 2015, and the actress has been getting candid about her kid ever since. That being said, the Pirates of the Caribbean star kept her lips mostly zipped about her first little one until after she arrived. Knightley and her husband, James Righton, didn’t formally announce that they were expecting, but instead displayed her baby bump in several haute couture gowns during press for The Imitation Game. The model did joke with Ellen DeGeneres, though, that she might go into labor during a December 2014 episode of her show. “My plan is to get it out,” the Teddington, London, native said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show at the time. [I'll] drop it out, keep working. Pick [the baby] up, that's my plan. That would be wonderful for television, but not so good for me." Knightley revealed that she and her husband were expecting their second child when she stepped out in Paris in May 2019. The actress showed off her budding belly in a white and tan off-the-shoulder dress on her way to a Chanel party. She was spotted pushing a stroller four months later. [jwplayer RfzX6gcd-l3ahXupL] The debut came six months after she bashed Duchess Kate’s post-baby public appearances in an essay for Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (and Other Lies). “We stand and watch the TV screen,” Knightley wrote in October 2018. “[Kate] was out of hospital seven hours later with her face made up and high heels on. The face the world wants to see. … Hide. Hide our pain, our bodies splitting, our breasts leaking, our hormones raging. Look beautiful. Look stylish, don’t show your battleground, Kate. Seven hours after your fight with life and death, seven hours after your body breaks open, and bloody, screaming life comes out. Don’t show. Don’t tell. Stand there with your girl and be shot by a pack of male photographers.” Knightley, who was spotted pushing a stroller four months after her pregnancy reveal, made her relationship with the musician public in April 2011. They tied the knot in France in May 2013. While the Love Actually star may be mum’s the word about her pregnancies, she has lots to say about her daughter over the years. Keep scrolling for a look at her best parenting quotes since welcoming Edie.

Credit: Sonia Recchia/WireImage

Keira Knightley's Best Quotes About Parenting 2 Children: Motherhood Is 'Quite Extraordinary'

Real talk! Keira Knightley became a mom in 2015, and the actress has been getting candid about her kid ever since. That being said, the Pirates of the Caribbean star kept her lips mostly zipped about her first little one until after she arrived. Knightley and her husband, James Righton, didn’t formally announce that they were expecting, but instead displayed her baby bump in several haute couture gowns during press for The Imitation Game. The model did joke with Ellen DeGeneres, though, that she might go into labor during a December 2014 episode of her show. “My plan is to get it out,” the Teddington, London, native said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show at the time. [I'll] drop it out, keep working. Pick [the baby] up, that's my plan. That would be wonderful for television, but not so good for me." Knightley revealed that she and her husband were expecting their second child when she stepped out in Paris in May 2019. The actress showed off her budding belly in a white and tan off-the-shoulder dress on her way to a Chanel party. She was spotted pushing a stroller four months later. [jwplayer RfzX6gcd-l3ahXupL] The debut came six months after she bashed Duchess Kate’s post-baby public appearances in an essay for Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (and Other Lies). “We stand and watch the TV screen,” Knightley wrote in October 2018. “[Kate] was out of hospital seven hours later with her face made up and high heels on. The face the world wants to see. … Hide. Hide our pain, our bodies splitting, our breasts leaking, our hormones raging. Look beautiful. Look stylish, don’t show your battleground, Kate. Seven hours after your fight with life and death, seven hours after your body breaks open, and bloody, screaming life comes out. Don’t show. Don’t tell. Stand there with your girl and be shot by a pack of male photographers.” Knightley, who was spotted pushing a stroller four months after her pregnancy reveal, made her relationship with the musician public in April 2011. They tied the knot in France in May 2013. While the Love Actually star may be mum’s the word about her pregnancies, she has lots to say about her daughter over the years. Keep scrolling for a look at her best parenting quotes since welcoming Edie.

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Jumping for Joy

Knightley thought it was “important” to be “happy" for her daughters during the coronavirus pandemic, she told Harper’s Bazaar U.K. in June 2021. "We have a trampoline in our garden, and we decided we were only allowed to wear dresses on it,” the actress explained. "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. I thought, 'What is the point of these lovely things sitting in the wardrobe, when it feels quite apocalyptic and scary outside?’"

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Quarantine Cutie

"The baby, who I thought would be [sitting] and very easy to look after for quite a while, at 9 months just decided to get up and start walking,” Knightley said during a September 2020 Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon appearance. "I think at any other point if we hadn’t been locked down, I would've been like, 'Whoa, my kid's a genius!' And as it was, I was just like, 'Sit the f--k down. We are not ready for this as well.'"

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Better Safe Than Sorry

"If I don’t do it my boobs will explode,” Knightley told The Telegraph of pumping in October 2019. “I mean, quite literally. It’s going everywhere. So, you know, that’s not happening. The pump is with me. It’s fine."

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Busy Bee

“You can tell I’ve got a 6-week-old baby,” the actress said on BBC Breakfast in October 2019. “I’m talking, but I’ve got no idea where I’m going. This is about the first time since I gave birth that my hair has been brushed — and I didn’t brush it. Lovely Luke, who is my hairdresser today, he brushed it. I was in my pajamas when they got there and this is somebody else’s dress.”

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Pros and Cons

“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 them is quite tricky,” the actress told Associated Press in August 2019 of filming Official Secrets while sleep-training her daughter. “I felt very on edge.” Because of that, she was able to use “all” of those emotions while acting.

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Time to Play

“We’re really deep, deep, deep into Paw Patrol,” the actress told Jimmy Fallon on a March 2019 episode of his show. “It’s like toddler crack, isn’t it? … We have to act it out as well. We have bath toys. Paw Patrol is in the bath, and she’ll only let me be Rubble, but Rubble is rubbish.”

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Aftermath

So how has motherhood affected her acting career? “I think I play everything differently now that I’m a parent,” the star told The Inquirer in March 2019. “Obviously, it just has an impact on your point of view about everything. Certainly, a woman who doesn’t have a child could play a part and do a perfectly good job, but I think there are certainly nuances that the experience brings to you that I might not have thought about before I had a kid.”

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Tough Time

“I don’t think we give women enough credit for the physical and emotional marathon they go through when becoming a mother,” she told Balance in January 2019. “I come from a place of amazing privilege; I have an incredible support system; I’ve been unbelievably lucky in my career; I can afford good childcare, and yet I still find it really fucking difficult. It’s OK to say that.”

Knightley added: “It doesn’t mean I don’t love my kid, it’s just me admitting that the sleep deprivation, the hormonal changes, the shift in relationship with my partner, are all things that make me feel as if I’m failing on a daily basis.”

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Movie Buff

When it comes to Disney movies, Knightley picks and chooses which ones she lets her little one watch. “I just wonder what Elsa would say to Ariel and Cinderella because Elsa has some serious opinions about Anna going off with a guy that she’s only just met and saying she would marry him,” she told The Press Association in November 2018. “She is like, ‘Absolutely that is not OK,’ and in fact, everyone in Frozen is not OK with that.”

She noted: “What would Elsa say to Ariel, who gives up her voice for a man? A man, by the way, she has only seen dance round a ship and then drown! And it’s 100 percent amazing of Ariel to save the guy, I’m totally up for that, but what would Elsa make of that? I think Elsa would be like: ’Babe, you’ve got to get to know him better, don’t give up your voice yet.’”

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Dream Job

When it comes to her daughter’s career aspirations, Knightley revealed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in October 2018, “She did want to be a dentist, which I was super happy about because I thought, ‘You know that’s a stable career’ ... It was Peppa Pig. There was a dentist episode. Now she wants to be a lion, which I think is slightly more problematic. But she roars very well! ... I am going to support her in anything that she wants to do.”

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No Sugarcoating

Besides bashing Kate, the actress opened up about her childbirth experience in detail in her October 2018 essay. “To my girl: My vagina split,” she wrote. “You came out with your eyes open. Arms up in the air. Screaming. They put you on to me, covered in blood, vernix, your head misshapen from the birth canal. Pulsating, gasping, screaming. You were pushing yourself up with your arms, furious at your frailty. Wanting to see. Wanting to know … I remember the s--t, the vomit, the blood, the stitches. I remember my battleground.”

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Gushing Over Her Girl

Knightley is a big fan! “She’s great in every way,” the new mom said of her daughter on The Jonathan Ross Show in December 2016. “She’s obviously a genius, and obviously the best child in the entire world and very well-made.”

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Shut-Eye

After three years, Edie still wasn’t sleeping through the night, Knightley told Us Weekly exclusively in September 2018. “She has occasionally slept through the night, but not in any kind of prolonged sense.”

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Lots of Love

“The love thing is astonishing,” the model said of motherhood in her 2015 Elle cover story. “It’s a very primal, primal love. That’s quite extraordinary. 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 added: “Also, I have to say, 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.’ 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 f--king extraordinary.’”

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Tough Film Critics

The Boston Strangler star revealed during a March 2023 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that Delilah did not enjoy watching her mom in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms "at all.” Knightley explained: “She was like, 'You should be dressed in rainbows, and why are you so angry?’”

Edie, for her part, “wasn’t impressed” by Pirates of the Caribbean. “She watched 10 minutes. She was far too terrified,” the British actress recalled to Jimmy Fallon. "She said, 'I don't want to see you doing that.’ She said, 'I don't like you in that, you're too pretty. But don't worry, you're not anymore.’”

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It’s a ‘Partnership’

“It has to be a partnership. The heavy lifting of childcare has to be acknowledged,” Knightley told Harper’s Bazaar UK in March 2023 of parenting with Righton. “It’s hard work, it’s vital, it’s undervalued. And it’s so exhausting.”