Keira Knightley gets people telling her they "hate her face" while she's doing her shopping.

Keira Knightley

Keira Knightley

The 31-year-old actress - who has daughter Edie, 18 months, with husband James Righton - claims she doesn't often get complimented in public, but can't understand why she attracts so much vitriol.

She said: "Yesterday I had two really lovely people come up to me in the street and just say how much they like my work, which almost never happens.

"[The angry ones] are very odd ... It feels like you're not meant to be walking down the street doing your shopping. Or they just hate your work, in which case they say, 'I hate your work'. Or they hate your face, in which case they say, 'I hate your face'. But it's more like a kind of jokey, 'Oh God, I've always hated you' Or, 'I've always found your face so annoying.' I've had that quite a few times. Like, 'Oh sorry! Sorry about that.' Yeah. So there's still a couple of those, but not as much as it was."

The 'Begin Again' actress cultivates a more glamorous image now than in the early days of her career and she admits she feels like a different person now.

She said: "I feel like they're two very different people. And I quite like that. I like creating a character because that's where I feel comfortable."

But on her days off, Keira prefers to dress down.

She added: "It feels like I can separate it all out a bit better."

The 'Pirates of the Caribbean' star finds she goes through incredibly productive periods of working but then needs to follow them with "absolute nothingness".

She told Harper's Bazaar magazine: "I'm very ambitious and totally ambivalent at the same time. I do periods where I work a lot and then ... it has to go to absolute nothingness."