Diane Kruger

And just in case the neon lights of popularity fade, Diane Kruger isn’t going to rest on her laurels. She has not stopped shooting movies. Her husband, who is also an actor, accompanies him in Narco and Joyëux Noel . Although the most important is Copying Beethoven , by Agnieszka Holland , a biography of the famous composer, played by Ed Harris , in which Diane Kruger is the assistant who passes him the sheet music and with whom he ends up falling in love with her.

Diane Heidkrueger (her real last name, which she later reduced to simplify) came into the world on July 15, 1976, in Algermissen (Germany), a town near Hannover. There she spent her childhood, in which twice a week she had a somewhat hard occupation, because according to German customs, two children with lighted candles cannot be missing at wakes, next to the deceased. “I was one of those kids, watching people cry, and it was terrible.” She studied ballet from a very young age, moving to London to enter the school of the Royal Ballet Company. A knee injury cut short her aspirations, although from that moment on, when she was fifteen, she focused on carving out a career as a model. For this she returned to her native country, where she was hired by important firms. She finally traveled to Paris, to appear at the casting ofThe Fifth Element , by Luc Besson , who did not give her the part, but saw that she had possibilities and advised her to take acting classes. Thus, the young woman left her job as a model, settled in the French capital and enrolled in courses at the École Fleuron. She also appeared in all possible tests, until she managed to be signed for the telefilm The Piano Player , with Christopher Lambert and Dennis Hopper . On the set of her next work, Mon idole , she fell in love with Guillaume Canet , the director, whom she married in September 2001. After a brief appearance as the prostitute in Neither for nor against (but quite the opposite), the aforementioned Besson recommended her as the protagonist of 24 hours to the limit , a car racing film based on Michel Vaillant , a famous comic.

The great opportunity came to Kruger when he appeared, competing with 3,000 applicants, for the tests for the role of Helena, in Troy , the blockbuster that his compatriot Wolfgang Petersen was going to direct , who had insisted on finding the spitting image of the character. . Diane Kruger’s face so convinced him that he decided to hire her even though she was completely unpopular. And despite the actress’s obvious natural beauty, it took four hours of makeup to make Helen look like the most attractive woman of antiquity, just as Homer described her. “I hope Paris wasn’t just attracted to her looks, but also her vulnerability. I think in The Iliad, the character seems too frivolous, but the script for Troy humanizes her, showing that she was alone in a gilded cage”, explains the actress about the character.

Shortly after Troy took the billboards by storm, Obsession , the American version of the French thriller Flash-Back, the Apartment, was released . Actually, Kruger shot this film before Troy , but the producers delayed the release to take advantage of the newly acquired pull for the actress. Another producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, succumbed to her charms and cast her as a co-star in The Search , an update on “old time” adventure movies. “She exudes dynamism, a sense of humor, she and at the same time she is a very responsible girl,” Bruckheimer has said of the actress. For her, it was a dream come true, especially working with Nicolas Cage ., whom he admired from a young age. “I have told him that I fell in love with him when I went to see Moonstruck, when I was twelve years old”, she comments.