Diane Kruger: Schöner 
Irrtum

Diane Kruger was cast as the most beautiful woman in the world right at the start of her career when she prevailed over three thousand other applicants to land the role of Helen in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy alongside Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom. At the time, nobody would have guessed that the now forty-seven-year-old would go on to establish herself permanently both in Hollywood and in French arthouse cinema. Perhaps in part because she had started out as a model. At the age of sixteen, Diane Heidkrüger – that’s her real name – moved from the small town of Algermissen near Hildesheim to Paris, worked as a model, and soon also as an actress.

She speaks accent-free English, which led to director Quentin Tarantino doubting that she was actually German when she auditioned for Inglourious Basterds in 2009. Today Kruger makes blockbusters in America and shoots independent films in France. Soon she will be working with Turkish-German director Fatih Akin again, who had already directed her in In the Fade, for which she won the Award for Best Actress at Cannes. At the end of 2025, she will star in his coming-of-age film “Amrum” in cinemas.

Since your big Hollywood debut in Troy, you’ve managed to establish yourself as a successful actress. To what extent was that a question of fate?

I guess you could call it fate that I ended up becoming an actress. Though the same could be said for me becoming a mother. When my daughter was born in 2018, it was unexpected, in a way. It came at a time when I no longer really believed it would happen. That’s the good thing about life: If you don’t go looking for something, often it will come to you.

Has being a mother changed the way you see your own mother?

It has. And it’s made me wonder how people manage with two children. My mother had me and my brother to deal with. Being a mother is the hardest job in the world. I think I understand my mother a lot better now and everything she’s been through. Especially as things weren’t easy for her financially. But my brother and I turned out reasonably well. [laughs] She also showed a lot of trust in me, letting me go when I was sixteen so I could pursue a career in modeling.

Your hometown of Algermissen is relatively small, with just eight thousand inhabitants. How does a person like you make it from the province to Hollywood?

I realized early on that I was going to travel around the world. I was always really good at history and languages at school. My mother loved France, and I really wanted to see the country myself. To tell the truth, I was conceived in Paris. But later on ( … )

→ Read the entire interview in rampstyle #31.