Keira Knightley's breakdown helped her cope with motherhood.
Keira Knightley
The 33-year-old actress has admitted that she struggled to cope with being a new mother at first when she welcomed her daughter Edie with husband James Righton in 2015 but believes that suffering a breakdown at the age of 22, when she first found fame, and the resulting therapy, helped her to deal with it.
She told The Guardian: "Your body just created life and now it's shifting in order to feed it. That's monumental and we're all expected to go: 'Oh no, all good, I'm groovy - I haven't slept, I'm fine. That I'm able to forgive myself for not being brilliant [as a parent] every f**king day is probably because of that breakdown."
'Colette' actress Keira also hit out at how women are portrayed in society, saying that they are forced to be "sexy" or a "virgin-mother".
She said: "Before motherhood, you're sexy, but if we talk about the whole vagina-splitting thing then that's terrifying; there's no sex there, so what we do is go into the virgin-mother retrofit, that's nice and safe. The problem with those two images is I think very few women actually identify with them. Women are meant to play the flirt or the mother in order to get their voice heard. I can't. It makes me feel sick.
"They tell me what it is to be a woman. Be nice, be supportive, be pretty but not too pretty, be thin but not too thin, be sexy but not too sexy, be successful but not too successful. ... But I don't want to flirt and mother them, flirt and mother, flirt and mother. I don't want to flirt with you because I don't want to f**k you, and I don't want to mother you because I am not your mother. ... I just want to work, mate. Is that OK? Talk and be heard, be talked to and listen. Male ego. Stop getting in the way."
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