The Power and the Inglory

If there were no Diane Kruger, you feel someone would have had to invent her. Perched daintily and purposely in Claridges’ Hotel, Diane Kruger looks precisely as you’d suppose a woman who once played Helen of Troy might do. The movie star luminosity, a perk of her profession, is offset by those uncannily perfect Mittle European features. I think I’m staring too much. I know I am. I keep thinking I’m talking with Coppelia or some classically wrought relief in Prague come to life.

If only I had remembered to bring some mathematical instruments, I’m pretty sure the measurements between her facial features would come out as a pleasing Fibonacci sequence.
Concentrate, Brady. She’s talking to you.
“In Germany, we do it like this,” she explains, putting her thumb in the air.
We’re harping on a plot point in Inglourious Basterds, Mr. Quentin Tarantino’s latest and arguably greatest film, a small, clever twist I cannot divulge in print because the good people at Universal Pictures – that film’s distributors – all know where I live.
Ms. Kruger readily admits she chased down her role as Bridget von Hammersmark, the Goebbels appointed starlet turned double agent who hooks up with the titular Jewish-American anti-Nazi squad for some Tarantino brand mayhem.
“It sounds a little corny to say it,” she says, “but I was so sure it was the role I was born to play. And it was all that. It was definitely a dream.”
I wonder if she had any reservations. Mr. Tarantino’s entertainment plays fast and loose with the history of the Third Reich, an indelicate, broadly comic treatment of what is still a touchy subject for many of Ms. Kruger’s fellow nationals. The 33-year-old insists, however, that there was never really a doubt in her mind.
“Maybe I should feel ambivalent,” she says. “But really  I think the opposite. I get offered a lot of World War Two movies and I have never wanted that kind of association. But this movie comes along and I really think this is the movie that all Germans have hoped for. What would have happened if someone had kicked Hitler’s ass? Of course that’s a movie all Germans want to see. Nobody could take more pleasure from seeing the Third Reich come down in a Quentin Tarantino than we do.”
A classic Teutonic femme fatale, the Bridget von Hammersmark role is a study in noir and Expressionist signifiers – fur, heels, smoulder, Brecthian awareness – just the sort of cinematic attributes Ms. Kruger insists she has practiced for her entire life.
“Being German I am very familiar with movies from early German cinema,” she says. “Those were the kind of movies that were on TV all the time when I was growing up. But for this film I decided to seek out less obvious references. I didn’t want her to be as obvious as Marlene Dietrich. So I studied the lesser-known actress Hildegard Knef.”
She laughs. “But of course Quentin came along provided his own list of references. It was a pretty long list. You can imagine, right?”
So I’m guessing she got along just fine with her director, then?
“Oh yes,” she gushes. “I had always heard that he was the ultimate actors’ director. All the actors in his films stand out because he really works on performance. He’s fun but he’s a very demanding director; he’s very attached to his writing. He really wants you to say every word that he has written very precisely, particularly the English dialogue – he obviously doesn’t speak German or French – so the dialogue is a great pleasure but it’s also a great challenge. Every time you read it you pick up on a different nuance. But you never mind when something is worth it.”
It helped, of course, that in common with Tarantino’s superb new WW2 set Spaghetti Western, Ms. Kruger is multi-lingual. Born in Algermissen in 1976 to a computer specialist and a bank executive, the young Diane Heidkrüger – as she then was – was a promising ballerina; indeed, she had just successfully auditioned for London’s Royal Ballet School when an injury brought her career to a premature halt.
When she talks about it I note it’s the only time she stops smiling: “It was very difficult in the beginning,” she winces. “Being young I was just thinking that it’s all over. Everything is over. But ultimately, it helped me to become what I am today and there are so many things that ballet brought to my life – the discipline, the order – that I’m still really grateful for.”
At 16, she dusted herself off and went into modelling. She liked the travel and used her time productively, learning French and English while touring the continent’s art galleries. It was Luc Besson, the archly low-fallutin’ French auteur, who suggested Diane might like to try her hand at acting. Her first major role came in 2002, in Mon Idole, her then husband Guillaume Canet’s directorial debut. But it was her role in Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 epic Troy that gained the most attention, not all of it good.
“I was in at the deep end,” she says. “I was still at the stage where you’re thinking ’wow, I’m in a movie’. It was tough.”
Bloodied, but unbowed, she has since carved out a neat bi-continental niche, deftly alternating between mainstream Hollywood values – Dawson Creek’s Joshua Jackson is her partner of three years, a recurrent role as Nicolas Cage’s wife in the megabucks National Treasure franchise – and smaller, work-for-scale French projects.
Her dedication to her craft has not gone unnoticed by industry mavens; she was chosen to host the 60th Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and was a jury member at last year’s Berlinale. She, in turn, is fiercely proud of her association with European cinema.
“I’m European,” she says, firmly. “I’m German but I live in France. I’ve been abroad for most of my life so I pride myself in being European. I really want to be the face of Europe. We, as Europeans, share so much culture, so much history, and those are the stories that I’d like to tell. And we should be telling those stories. Because otherwise the Americans will tell them and they’ll use people with fake or British accents!”