Keira Knightley is playing dress-up yet again and she’s doing it in style, probably Oscar-nomination style. Every year she brings life to characters from different times and social backgrounds, as her long elegant neck and those to-die-for cheek-bones never grow out of style and are considered as stunning now as they were 300 years ago.

After her first big screen “goal,” playing plucky tomboy of 2002's “Bend It Like Beckham,” it was one period tale after the other. First was the 2005 version of an all-time classic, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” directed by Joe Wright, where she played Lizzie Bennet, and for which received an Oscar nomination.

Last September there was “Atonement,” based on Ian McEwan's novel, also directed by the British filmmaker Joe Wright. In the movie, declared Best Film of the Year at the 61st British Academy Film Awards, she played Cecilia, the upper-crust love interest to James McAvoy's tragically fated servant-turned-soldier and wore that unforgettable green dress.

Meanwhile, she managed to do three blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean” with Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, a trilogy that grossed a total of $2,794,366,513 in tickets sold all around the world. There she portrayed Elizabeth Swann, a modest and mannered young girl transformed into a courageous pirate.

The 23-year-old seems to love portraying powerful women in powerful stories. “For me, what I love about film is its complete escapism. I find personally that these costumes, these weird societies, help me to forget my life. I actually just dive into the story. I think that’s why as an actress I like being in them as well. It’s a way into a fantastic fantasy world,” she says in an interview with MoviesOnline.com.

It’s time for a different kind of character to enter the scene, one that’s more famous, more courageous and last, but not least, more of a fashion icon than all the other ones. In this year’s “The Duchess” Keira plays the part of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, another modest and mannered young girl, aged 17, who becomes the wife of a powerful man and tries to change the way women are seen in her time.

Her husband, William Cavendish, the fifth Duke of Devonshire, a dull and completely insensitive man, a stranger to the notion of communication, but a sort of Casanova among whatever woman passes his way, considers her unworthy, as she failed her “job” as a wife and didn’t provide him with a male heir, as promised by Georgiana’s mother, instead giving birth to a gaggle of girls.

So she decides to focus her attention elsewhere and gain her love from everybody else, since she can’t get her husband’s attention and affection. With her fashionable appearance and charms she becomes loved by the people and by members of the high class, due both to her wit, as well as her ultra-fashionable looks. She was the talk of the town, and one French diplomat reports: “When she appeared, every eye was turned towards her. When absent, she was the subject of universal conversation.”

The story of yet another woman born too soon, in an era that won’t accept her fully, in times where the woman is merely an object of great beauty and a mean of bringing heirs to the world is told beautifully by director Saul Dibb, with help from Ralph Fiennes’ breathtaking performance, who scores yet another masterpiece of a role as the cold Duke.

Talking about her own part, Knightley states “I thought she was fabulous. A fascinating character who was politically so influential, such a huge fashion icon and such a force of nature. And yet privately she was so intensely vulnerable. She was incredibly lonely. I don’t like to think of her as a victim. Yes, she was horrendously oppressed and all the rest of it, but I think actually, fundamentally, she is a survivor.”