Kiera Knightley stars as Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bennet in director Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice.

Turnabout is fun play for doe-eyed British actress Keira Knightley. She knows firsthand about being the celebrity deer in the headlights thanks to constant paparazzi and tabloid reporters interested in her every move. Knightley, 20, starts her first morning interview at the Toronto Film Festival with the playful prank of staring out her hotel room window to spy on a woman in a nearby apartment. Caught eyeballing the bathrobe-clad woman's breakfast routine, Knightley laughs hard when asked about the role reversal.

"Absolutely, it feels good for someone watched to become the watcher," she says. "It's only fair."

As far as her take on Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bennet, the female heroine of director Joe Wright's lush adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Knightley sees Lizzie as a young woman who enjoyed a good laugh despite polite society's disapproval. She considers the Austen heroine a role model.

"I must have read Pride and Prejudice over and over again as a young girl," says the actress best known for the Hollywood blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean. "Her spirit, the way she stands up for herself and her family at a time when a young woman is to do what she's told, that's something all young girls would benefit from seeing. I know I did."

Five sisters find their homespun world turned upside down when a wealthy young man and his equally wealthy friend visit their country village. Without a male heir, the Bennet family relies on prosperous marriages for their daughters to preserve the family's modest estate. But the core plot of Jane Austen's 1813 novel is Lizzie's romance with the arrogant Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen).

Knightley is opinionated and full of verve. She has small delicate features and is dressed every bit the stylishly young starlet. While Wright once considered her "too pretty" to play Lizzie, her tomboyish manner convinced him otherwise. At stake was her chance to play the one character she always wanted to play.

"This is the dream role for any young girl," she says. "I'm slightly older than Lizzie in the book, but I think I'm the right age to play the part. I look the right age, and I'm old enough to understand the constraints surrounding Lizzie."

British production company Working Title, best known for its Austen-like Bridget Jones comedies, tackles the type of period drama that's popular with movie audiences, but there's no guarantee of Pride and Prejudice's success. Recent missteps involve the more dramatic alterations of Austen's novels -- Merchant-Ivory's Jane Austen in Manhattan and the Bollywood version Bride and Prejudice.

Far below Knightley's hotel-room shenanigans, Wright sits in the lobby restaurant and describes his clear and specific ideas about the film that go beyond re-creating heritage Britain. The key plot twist is that Lizzie and her sisters lived in a time when the custom of families deciding marriages was coming to an end.

Wright's voice skips a beat when he excitedly describes Pride and Prejudice as a classic romantic comedy. His task was to be sure about saving the laughs for just the right moments between the agony and longing and heartache and tears.

"The relationship between Lizzie and Darcy is a mating game," Wright says over coffee. "The joy is the many surprises they experience. They think they hate each other, but they actually love each other. Lizzie and Darcy click because they take such a strong disliking to each other at first. His arrogance is something she has to see through in order to understand him."

Granted, Pride and Prejudice has its melodramatic moments. Melodrama, Wright agrees, provided the balancing act that he and screenwriter Deborah Moggach used to emphasize what they found important to the novel while still staying true to all the things loved by Austen's many devoted fans.

Class and social etiquette fall within the Austen boundaries. The one addition that might generate complains from the Janeists is a romantic nighttime scene between Lizzie and Darcy at the end of the story.

"I've always considered myself too cynical or too cool to be bothered with happy endings," Wright says. "But here I am making this timeless romance, and I want there to be a scene beyond the simple line of text that they get married.

"Austen devotees will have to forgive my creative alteration, but I was overtaken by Austen's sense of romance. I wanted to see them together, happy. That should count for something." ©