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. Last year it was announced that she will play the screen legend Marlene Dietrich in a five-part miniseries.
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.
