cinema
Diane Kruger Unfiltered Blonde
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he has just been a big hit alongside Dany Boon in Un Plan Parfait, one of the rare comedies in which this actress – whose Hitchcockian demeanour can be mistaken for coldness – has appeared. At 36, Diane Kruger has a screen career to be proud of, easily moving from her ex-husband, Guillaume Canet’s caustic Mon Idole to Quentin Tarantino’s Dantean Inglourious Basterds, while managing to stick by Nicolas Cage’s side in National Treasure. A profile of an actress who just keeps getting it right. By Jean-Pascal Grosso
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he has been in turn a dancer, a model, a muse for Dolce & Gabbana, a student at the highly acclaimed Cours Florent, the wife of Guillaume Canet, an aspiring actress and is now one of the brightest stars whose shine has reached all the way to Hollywood. She may only be 36, but Diane Kruger, née Heidkrueger, seems to have lived several lives already. “If I chose to be an actress, a profession full of ups and downs; it is because I wanted to flee boredom in any form.” But as an adolescent, Kruger’s dreams were focused more on ballet dancing. She left her native Germany at the age of 13 to study at the prestigious Royal Ballet School in London. It was a dream come true for a young girl – until it was shattered by an accident. A serious knee injury ended her hopes of a career in dance. Although at the time she thought she would “die of despair”, Diane bounced back, signed up for modelling classes and within a few years her face – angular, feline and frosty – had designers the world over clamouring for her. Frosty, incidentally, is a word that seems to follow the artist around like a shadow; almost a curse. “It’s because of my upbringing,” Kruger explains. “I wasn’t to show too much emotion or my feelings.” And she adds: “It also helps protect you from people trying to chat you up and in my professional life it creates a distance which encourages people to think twice before just suggesting any old thing!” And then again, Diane Kruger also has character. She is a woman who does not hide her melancholy or nostalgia for those “first times” she will never live again, who dreams of a family and children but refuses to imagine herself “sitting down with her partner to plan his life”.
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Her career is just like Kruger herself: rich, subtle and elusive. She played the lascivious wife of a cynical television presenter in Guillaume Canet’s Mon Idole (the couple married in September 2011 but are now separated). It was a funny, piquant, and wild role and Kruger was stunning in it. She followed up with the worthy Michel Vaillant (Need for Speed), adapted from the comic strip of the same name, then joined an all-star casting (Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom etc) for the blockbuster Troy before becoming Nicolas Cage’s faithful side kick in the Benjamin Gates franchise. And all the while she kept up her French career with the likes of Anything for Her, Forces Spéciales and Farewell My Queen. Talking of her latest role with Dany Boon in Un Plan Parfait she admitted: “I’m not necessarily a comedian by nature but he really helped me loosen up.” Diane Kruger is now one of the upper crust of international cinema. She appears on talk shows and at festivals around the world alongside the greatest stars. And we will see her again soon as the step-mother of Abraham Lincoln in The Green Blade Rises, from the cult director Terrence Malick, and in The Host, a sci-fi flick slated to be directed by Andrew Niccol. “I don’t like programming anything,” Kruger insists. “That’s what attracted me to the script of Un Plan Parfait: a simple encounter can completely blow away a settled life.” Unpredictable and passionate, this admirer of Romy Schneider – “The sadness in her eyes in her last films just kills me,” – isn’t ready to shift to a lower, more stay-at-home gear yet when it comes to choosing her roles. One thing is certain: with Diane Kruger, the best is yet to come!