Keira Knightly jumped at chance to play a character that survives to the credits!

Dancing the Knight away but Keira can’t hold a tune in her head for long!

Actors often talk about the quality of the writing or getting the chance to work with a particular director as being the deciding factor in taking on a film role.

But the thing that stood out for Keira Knightley above all else about Begin Again was that her character was still alive at the end of it!

“My character has pretty much died in everything I’ve done for the last five years,” laughs the actress.

“I decided I’d like to do something where I didn’t have to go through heavy emotional turmoil and die, if possible. There’s a touch of emotional turmoil in this, but in the end I found it to be incredibly hopeful.”

Keira plays Gretta in the film, a British songwriter living in New York who’s at a low ebb after her musician boyfriend makes it big and runs off with a woman from his record label.

She’s on the brink of giving up on her own musical dreams and moving back home when one of her songs is heard by down-on-his-luck music executive Dan (Mark Ruffalo).

The 29-year-old Oscar-nominated actress did all her own singing for the film although rules out an album release with husband James Righton, co-vocalist and keyboardist with indie rock band Klaxons.

“I wasn’t required to sing like Adele, which was fortunate,” laughs Keira. “I would love to have that voice, but I just don’t. Gretta is not someone who likes performing, she’s someone who likes singing for herself and is actually quite shy.

“I had done a bit of singing in a film four years ago called The Edge of Love, but that was very much in this kind of 40s style and I had never done anything like this.

“James helped me with the guitar, but I couldn’t play the songs and sing at the same time and he had absolutely no sympathy at all about my failure to learn properly.

“It was a potential for murder on both sides. It could have been the first murder where the motive was the guitar.”

The film is written and directed by John Carney, who enjoyed Oscar-winning success with the similarly themed Once in 2006. It also stars James Corden as Gretta’s best mate and rising star Hailee Seinfeld as Dan’s disruptive daughter.

Maroon 5’s lead singer Adam Levine plays the cheating ex-boyfriend clearly affected by fame. Despite her real-life marriage to a musician, Keira says music doesn’t play much of a role in her life.

“James sometimes puts music on my phone he thinks I should listen to, but it just doesn’t go anywhere. My brother, who has been in lots of bands and is now a sound recordist, will try a lot as well.

“And sometimes I will connect with something, and it’s amazing when I do, but they’re so few and far between, that it’s not a natural state for me.

“But I’m always fascinated that it isn’t. I think, ‘Why is it that everyone else goes BOOM and it’s so tied up with a memory or a period of their life and I literally have no idea?’

“I can only just about remember one album that was connected to a time the first Strokes album, which I guess was when I was living in Glasgow in maybe 2003?

“It’s the only one I have and I only really remember that because I was on my own for such a lot of the time, and it was the one CD that somebody had given me, so I just had it on because I had nothing else to do.”

Our verdict: 3/5

A familiar tale, especially if you’ve seen John Carney’s Dublin-based Once, which avoids being formulaic by playing a different tune in its third act.

Keira’s Gretta is a delicate flower in danger of being choked by the wild life of New York and Ruffalo brings the comedy with his desperate Dan act. You can’t see them getting together to do anything other than make music (and that’s not a euphemism), but when they do it’s quite a tune.

Once was probably enough as far as Carney’s unlikely relationship angle goes, but the movie’s music really is the food of love.

Begin Again is at cinemas now.