Keira Knightley is having a blast as a spy’s lover

Keira Knightley stars in Kenneth Branagh movie 17 years after he turned her down for a role in Hamlet.

She may not have done too badly in the time since, but Keira Knightley still remembers the first time she auditioned to appear in a Kenneth Branagh movie and he rejected her.

“I went up for a part in Hamlet when I was 11 and I didn’t get it,” she recalled. “But he was very lovely about it.”

The great wrong corrected itself 17 years later when Sir Ken cast the Pirates of the Caribbean actress in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the first time they’ve crossed paths since.

Keira plays Cathy, the girlfriend of Tom Clancy’s CIA agent who is on his fourth on-screen incarnation since Alec Baldwin played him in The Hunt For Red October in 1990.

Harrison Ford then took on the role in two films Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger before Ben Affeck gave it a go in The Sum of All Fears.

The latest film, with Star Trek’s Chris Pine in the title role, is the first not to be adapted from one of Clancy’s books (the author died in October last year) and strips Jack back to his earliest days as a secret service recruit while updating the story to the present day.

As a doctor who helps him recover from injuries sustained in Afghanistan who then finds herself embroiled in his first mission to Moscow, Keira’s Cathy is given a lot more to do than her predecessors in the role.

“I’d never done a thriller before but it has always been a genre that I really like,” Keira told me when we met ahead of the film’s European premiere in Leicester Square. “When I finished doing Anna Karenina I realised that I’d been playing characters that pretty much died or something horrendous happened to them for about the last five years so I fancied doing something fun.”

Keira’s life away from the cameras has been more enjoyable than her downcast professional roles in recent times and she got married to musician James Righton in a low-key ceremony in the south of France last May.

The Oscar-nominated actress does her best to keep her private life out of the limelight, but they made a rare appearance together when James accompanied her to Monday’s premiere.

Not only are they hardly seen together in public, it’s not that frequent that they are found in the same city.

“I travel for my job all the time and so does he, so I think it’s just part of my life,” she said, before switching focus back to the film.

“As far as the relationship between Jack and Cathy goes, I was interested with the idea of what happens to a relationship when there is a secret. You know, when there is something that can’t be discussed, and it’s something that can tear two people apart even though they are completely in love.

“I was interested in what that did to the relationship and I thought that was a very interesting part of the story as far as what people who work in secret services have to give up and the emotional toll it takes.”

Clad in a plaid design dress, giving hint to the Scottish roots inherited from her mum, Glasgow-born playwright Sharma Macdonald, 28-year-old Keira has always appreciated how lucky she has been since coming to attention in Gurinder Chadha’s British movie, Bend It Like Beckham.

“There are way fewer female roles than there are male and there are a lot of wonderful actresses, so that makes for lots of competition. I was very happy to get this job,” she smiled.

OUR VERDICT: 3/5

A solid if unspectacular thriller that does a good job of rebooting the Jack Ryan character even if it brings very little new to the spy action genre.

Chris Pine shows signs of being able to take Tom Clancy’s creation off in a more interesting, introspective direction if he sticks around longer than the other actors to have played him and Kevin Costner adds solid support as his mentor.

For now, the greatest undercover coup is that the majority of a film set in Moscow was shot in London, Liverpool and Manchester.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is at cinemas now.