KEIRA TREASURES HER ROLE AS SHE ONCE AGAIN SWASHES HER BUCKLE ON THE FOAMING MAIN

If fans had some difficulty following the story of the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, Keira Knightley can sympathise. The 22-year-old beauty who makes her third appearance as Elizabeth Swan in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End says even she got confused at times.

"It has been really weird," she admits, "because I can't even remember where we started. It felt like the last two years had never happened and we have been working on Pirates of the Caribbean the entire time."

But even with the stresses involved in filming Dead Man's Chest and At World's End back to back, Keira says she wouldn't have had it any other way.

"It has been great," she says enthusiastically. "It's a long haul. I have never done anything as long, but the guys are great and it is pretty much all the same people and it's nice, it's good fun."

In the first Pirates of the Caribbean film Elizabeth Swan wore dresses with corsets so constricting that Keira almost passed out. For the second film she was wearing more of a tomboy-ish pirate outfit and there's a new look for the third one as well.

"I'm in a kind of oriental type thing with shorts - it's the first time I have got legs out," she laughs.

"I am really glad, it's so hot Everybody else has got their pirate stuff on. The rest of the time I've got kind of pirate look instead of the corset."

The reason for the Oriental garb is because the closely-guarded plot of film number three features Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun Fat. He plays the notorious Sao Feng, a Chinese pirate whose help Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) enlists in his fight against Davy Jones.

Even though they did shoot the two films with only a few weeks off, Keira admits she was only joking when she says she got confused. Most of the time, she insists, it was quite easy to follow.

"We were doing it in chunks," she reveals. "It's not like we were doing one day on two, one day on three. Like for three weeks we were on number three and then the next month as soon as we got to the Bahamas we were on number two and then we went back to number three. So it hasn't been too bad."

One way of easing the burden was by having her mother, the Glasgow playwright Sharman Macdonald, spend some time on the set.

Keira dismissed suggestions that Macdonald was managing her career.

"She has never done that since I started," says Keira. "She's a writer, so she writes. She really is only there to hand me a cup of coffee occasionally. And be a mum," she laughs, "and tell me off!"

Her one concession to her busy Hollywood lifestyle is that she now has a personal assistant. She had previously resisted such a move.

"I said I didn't want to get one because I wasn't old enough to handle my life and I wanted to learn how to. The answer to that is that I only have him when I am working," she says.

" I don't have him when I am not working, but it gets to the point if you are working back to back you don't have any days off. I have bought a flat, I have done stuff, but I can't be on the phone all the time trying to co-ordinate everything and be doing my job.

"So I have got somebody who can co-ordinate stuff and so I don't have to think about that he can just say right go in this direction'," she explains.

But things might be easier in her next film. Keira just last week started shooting on her new film The Best Time of Our Lives, in which she plays a woman in love with the poet Dylan Thomas.

It's a world away from the megabucks opulence of Pirates of the Caribbean, but Keira says she relies on her instincts when choosing a film.

"It's just whatever catches my fancy. If it is a film I think I would want to see then that's kind of a good way to judge it. And if you meet the director and you like them then that's even a better way.

"But it just depends," she says.."

And in this case the attraction of having coffee made and being told off obviously played its part because the film was written by her mum.