By Ed Cumming posted last 04 Mar 2011
Ex-model and 'Troy' star Diane Kruger tells Ed Cumming about early setbacks and why her hero is Romy Schneider
It doesn’t take long to suspect that there is more to Diane Kruger than meets the eye. A blink, to be precise, or the half-second needed to process the fact that, when I arrive for our encounter in a London hotel, the German-born movie star, muse to Karl Lagerfeld and face of Calvin Klein, is not only leafing through The Daily Telegraph, but is also tucking into a huge breakfast of Eggs Benedict and a pot of sauté potatoes. “Hi,” she says, extending a thin wrist. It is slightly unnerving.
There is plenty for the eye, too, of course. In person, even in a slouchy top and jeans, the 34-year-old Kruger has the quality of a new gold coin: fresh, expensive somehow. Her beauty is quite relaxing to be near. She is in London in the wake of a new thriller, Unknown, in which she stars as an illegal-immigrant Bosnian taxi driver opposite Liam Neeson, who plays a scientist who loses his memory. The film follows the formula that was so successful in 2009’s Wanted: stick Neeson in front of a lot of bad guys and watch him go. “He’s so big,” Kruger says, the emphasis on “big”. “He’s got such a strong presence. He came to this leading man thing late, he’s really a character actor.”
If Neeson has enjoyed a change of tack of late, then so too has Kruger. To many in Britain she is still best known for her eye-catching turn as Helen in Troy, Wolfgang Petersen’s big-budget take on Homer’s epic, released in 2004. The film received mediocre reviews, but remains an impressive spectacle, with Kruger gemlike at its centre. However, alongside her modelling career, the part led many to assume that Kruger would forever be the quiet beauty. Unchallenging roles in films such as family action series National Treasure didn’t help, either.
“Helen was an almost impossible part to play,” says Kruger. “I knew that beforehand, I went into it with my eyes open. But I mean, what are you gonna do? Someone was going to play that part, it might as well have been me.”
She says she has learnt an awful lot in the years since. “Troy was only my second or third movie. I was terrified,” she says. “I’m lucky, a part like that could have killed my career.”
But it didn’t. In Britain and the US this was largely thanks to Quentin Tarantino who cast her in Inglourious Basterds, his Oscar-nominated parallel-universe Second World War thriller, as a German actress-turned-saboteur. Kruger’s performance won her a Golden Globe nomination and showed the world that she was much more than a pretty face.
For her own part, she doesn’t seem to have had too many doubts about her abilities. “You always know in yourself what you want to do, what you can do,” she says. “I wanted to get into cinema because of Romy Schneider. I loved the way she was a European actress,” she says. “She was German but even though she had an accent the French loved her.”
The comparison is interesting: Schneider was an Austrian-born German who between the Fifties and Seventies became one of French cinema’s most beloved stars, while also making selective forays into Hollywood. As well as training at the Cours Florent school in Paris (she still keeps a flat in the city), Kruger has maintained a parallel career in French film. One can’t help but wonder if the idiosyncrasies that endeared Schneider to her audience haven’t been ironed out of the safe, PR-groomed Kruger.
Growing up in Algermissen, a small town in Germany, she dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. She had won a place at London’s Royal Ballet School, before a leg injury led her to change tack and model. After five years that bored her and she moved into acting. Her parents divorced when she was 13 and she has not spoken to her alcoholic father for 17 years.
Acting, she says, offers an emotional outlet similar to that provided by ballet. “When you’re a kid you don’t really know what’s going on,” she says, “but I think it’s a way of excising pain. Those two, three hours a day get it out of you. I think that when I modelled that’s what was missing. Being German, I think we don’t really express a lot of things.”
It is tempting to place Kruger alongside Penélope Cruz and Marion Cotillard, European actresses who have found Hollywood success in the past decade, but she is quick to point out that she has had to approach it from a different angle. “Penelope has been very lucky to have Pedro Almodóvar,” she says, referring to the writer-director who made Cruz a star. “She made a career out of Spanish language films and then made the shift into playing a Spanish or Mexican person in American movies. When I started producers would say 'we like her, but lose the accent’. I don’t think anyone thinks the German accent is as nice as the French or Spanish one.”
She can appreciate the irony that, having perfected a glossy mid-Atlantic drawl for many movies, in Inglourious Basterds and Unknown she has been required to put on European accents again. It doesn’t seem to worry her. Indeed, one gets the impression of a confident and driven woman just starting to relax. “I don’t have to work just to work anymore,” she says. “More interesting parts come my way, so I can afford to say 'I don’t want to make that’.” Her dream director is Frenchman Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, The Beat that My Heart Skipped), but of those working in the US she is most excited by Black Swan’s Darren Aronofsky. “He makes my kind of movies,” she says.
She can also acknowledge the cost of starting her career in a frenzy of publicity. “Everything happened really fast,” she says. “I was away for two and a half years, I missed friends, some of my relationships suffered. I thought it was amazing but I also felt a little bit like I’d lost myself. I didn’t know where home was, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
The topic is off-limits, but one suspects this is a reference to her brief marriage and divorce from French director Guillaume Canet (now married to Cotillard). For the past five years, Kruger has been in a relationship with Canadian Joshua Jackson (best known as Pacey from Dawson’s Creek). “Definitely kids one day,” she says. “But no more marriage.”
In May, she begins shooting Farewell, My Queen, about the last days of Louis XVI’s court at Versailles. She plays Marie Antoinette, and laughs at the fact she’s portraying another of history’s famous women. “Everybody has feelings about these big, iconic women. Everyone has ideas of what they should be like or look like. You’re always setting yourself up.”
source:telegraph.co.uk
