Most Recent Posts

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has been adapted for TV or film at least 25 times. It's a title role made great by screen legends Greta Garbo and Vivian Leigh, and now, it's Keira Knightley's turn.

She reunites with Pride And Prejudice director Joe Wright in a new adaptation of the film. Knightley talks to Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, about bringing the character of Anna Karenina to life.

Interview Highlights

On the opening sequence

"Anna finds herself in the role of the perfect wife and the role of the perfect mother. And suddenly that role doesn't fit. So I think the first thing we did talk about was this idea of her, in the opening sequence, her dressing for the role of Anna Karenina. There was even talk very early on of do you take it one step further and do you actually see me, Keira Knightly, dressing as the actress dressing as the role of Anna Karenina. We thought that would be taking it just one step too far."

On reading the novel

"I think I first read it when I was about 19. Definitely late teens, early 20s. And it's really strange, cause it's the first novel I've ever reread and I was totally floored by how different I found it. I remembered it as being obviously very lush and tragically romantic and sweeping and all the rest of it. But I distinctly remember her as being innocent. I was entirely on her side. And I was really, really shocked when I came to it again last summer before we started shooting and totally didn't see her as innocent. And found her very difficult. And found Tolstoy's or what I perceived to be Tolstoy's opinion of her very difficult."

Enlarge Focus Features

Knightley earned Golden Globe nominations for her roles in Atonement and Pride & Prejudice, her other collaborations with Wright. Could the third time be a charm?

The weekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

For musician-composer-producer Gustavo Santaolalla, whose credits include The Motorcycle Diaries, Brokeback Mountain and the new film On The Road, which opens in theaters Dec. 21, the movie he could watch a million times is Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

Steve Granitz/WireImage

Composer Gustavo Santaolalla

When clerical workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach reached an impasse in talks with management over job security last week, they took what has become something of a rare step — they went on strike.

Once a mainstay of the labor arsenal, strikes have largely fallen off since the early 1980s. So a recent spate of high-profile work stoppages, including by Chicago teachers, non-unionized Walmart workers and New York City fast-food employees, has some experts wondering if we're seeing a resurgence of the tactic.

Thomas Kochan, co-director of the Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks years of pent-up frustration over stagnant wages and diminishing benefits has finally hit the boiling point.

Labor Actions

Work stoppages have fallen off precipitously since the early 1980s, according to data from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Number of work stoppages involving 1,000 or more employees, 1961-2011

Sgt. Marilyn Gonzalez and her daughter, Spc. Jessica Pedraza, served together in Kuwait and Iraq from January until December of 2010. But they weren't both supposed to go then.

They were in the Massachusetts Army National Guard, in the same company, but they had different jobs.

In 2010, Gonzalez was ordered to deploy to Iraq, but her daughter was not. Pedraza decided to put college on hold and changed her job in the military so that she would be sent to war with her mom. They didn't need supply specialists, but they did need a truck driver.

"When you told me that you wanted to deploy, I was so angry," Gonzalez, now 44, tells her daughter.

But Pedraza, now 22, said she couldn't stay home worrying.

"Whenever I would go out on a mission, you would go in my room and make my bed, and sometimes you would come back from your missions and catch me sleeping on your bed," she says.

Courtesy of Jessica Pedraza

The mother-daughter duo on one of the trucks they drove in Iraq in Camp Speicher, Tikrit, Iraq.