From Diane-Kruger.net
I know you guys are interested in reading all of Diane's latest interviews featured in international magazines. While I can't help with Italian or Spanish translations, I can offer you the German ones. So to start, I have translated the article featured in Vanity Fair Germany. It was a tough one, written very poetically and I'm sure I've made lots of mistakes, but maybe you can make some sense of it after all. I hope to be working on more translations asap. For now, enjoy this article.
The Unfinished One
Diane Kruger loves Oscar Wilde, lives in Paris and is the most successful German actress in Hollywood.
A little something is still missing for the world star from Algermissen: a huge movie, which will grant her an aura.
In the year 1956, Brigitte Bardot was nothing more than an acting hat-model. At that time she appeared as a supporting actor in the American history flick "The Beautiful Helen", playing a slave of the Princess of Troy. Just a mere ten years later she was the mascot of the French art cinema. In 1963 Jean-Luc Godard had written a mysterious lead just for her in "The Scorn", the playboy and art collector Gunter Sachs had married her in 1966. Ever since then Brigitte Bardot had an aura. Not until her advanced age it was discovered that there wasn't really that much behind it.
In the year 2004, Diane Kruger was nothing more than an acting cosmetics-model from Lower Saxony. Then she too played a role in a movie about the ancient Troy. Not a slave like Brigitte Bardot, but she was the beautiful Helen herself, chosen by Wolfgang Petersen for his sandal film "Troy".
Now, four years later, Diane emerges in the cinema with the movie "National Treasure: Book of Secrets". A comedic thriller, no masterpiece by Godard, which turns women into myths. But the most successful German in Hollywood still has time. And after all has Wolfgang Petersen as her discoverer.
The German director had already turned a model into a movie star before: "With Diane I thought of course of Nastassja Kinski", he says today. He had discovered the daughter of Klaus Kinski in 1976 for a crime tv movie and brought a career into full swing that would later stand under the patronage of Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola and Wim wenders.
But at first Diane Kruger earned only mockery after "Troy" was released. The critics were joking that her face would sell lipstick but couldn't launch a thousand ships. However, they couldn't prevent Kruger from shooting one movie after the other, one time an American blockbuster, the other time an European auteur cinema. She has worked with Dennis Hopper, Richard Gere and Nicolas Cage. And she lives in Paris.
But the magic turning point, at which brilliant looks turn into mysterious depths, that Brigitte-Bardot-moment, this one, she hasn't reached as of yet. Even if she hasn't less talent than the French actress.
Diane Kruger is well worth more intelligent than Brigitte Bardot. The blonde, very delicate woman is sitting on a white couch in New York. Because the couch is bouncing the photographer has put a book under one foot of the furniture, "Alexander The Great - The Art of Strategy".
Diane Kruger is sliding around on the couch and says: "I much prefer Oscar Wilde. 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' is my favorite book."
A favorite book always is a calling card. And just like the visage of the youngling Dorian Gray, there shines Diane Kruger's flawless face of an angel, immune to all traces of decline. Her literary hero is leading an excessive life full of mysteries. You can't tell though because a secret painting is ageing instead of him. But what is her secret? Where is it, the portrait of Diane Kruger?
The quick answer: maybe she doesn't have one. Maybe she is missing the aura of a Brigitte Bardot, because it doesn't work as a projection screen. Maybe all that she is missing is a huge film.
In the winter Diane was staying in Berlin for a couple of weeks. She was shooting the science-fiction "Mr. Nobody" in the Babelsberg Studios, in which she plays the former girlfriend of the main hero. The movie is about a world in which everyone is immortal and about the question how to choose the right life out of an infinite amount of possible lives.
Of course Diane Kruger let her producers escort her every couple of evenings to various obligatory localities in Berlin, like the Borchardt or the Grill Royal, just as it is required to do so for international stars. A couple of times her current boyriend, the Canadian television actor Joshua Jackson came to visit. But she felt the most comfortable when she sat in a Kreuzberg pub for students with her former high school friend, who is currently working on his dissertation in biology. She would lead such a life if she hadn't become a movie star.
Wasn't that weird for her high school friend to be sitting in icky pubs with the princess of Troy?
Not at all. I thought it was funny that my old buddy back in my school time who used to be skateboarder and copied my homework is now becoming a doctor." That's how Diane Kruger sees it. Even the biography of a biology student seems more mysterious than her own.
At the same time this history is uncommon enough. Diane Kruger comes from Algermissen, a village in Lower Saxony, whose most noticeable elements are houses with clinker facades, plastic slides, silos and acres. Neon yellow posters on lamp posts advertise the night shift for the disco with the slogan: "If 'normal' is too boring for you".
Normal was definitely too boring for Diane Kruger, when she grew up here and still going by the name of Heidkrüger. "You met [note: wrong use of German grammar by Diane] the same person twice a day", she says - and the charming lapse shows how remote the German grammar is for her already. Back then she used to live with her mother and her brother in a two-room flat, because her father, an alcoholic, had left the family. She was frustrated to be earning her pocket money as a candle carrier at funerals. And she was bored of the convent school in the shadow of the cathedral of Hildesheim.
Due to Diane at the age of 14 still looking as if she were 10, she couldn't even go to the village discos in the surrounding area. And because she was too small, she couldn't play handball with the boys, but only dance ballet with the girls. "The coolest thing you could do", she remembers, "was to become a waitress in the Cafe Hindenburg. That was the hang-out. The most gorgeous girls waitressed there. I tried for years to get in. But they never chose me."
What a miserable casting. Because the fine face of the pupil maybe prevented her from working as an accountant in Hildesheim today, just like her mother wished. 1992 she applied in Hamburg for the "Look of the Year" competition. And won.
Just a little time later the girl advertised the perfume "LouLou" by Cacharel in tv spots wearing a black wig and lived in an apartment with kitchen in Paris. In a model apartment-sharing community near the Tuileries. Diane Kruger led a life resembling the Drei-Wetter-Taft commercials, flew to Milan and New York once a week and went to the cinema almost every free evening with her French boyfriend. There, she didn't watch popcorn movies, but nouvelle-vague classics.
Diane Kruger learned French with Francois Truffaut and Claude Sautet. Ever since she had seen his 1970 movie "The Things of Life", she idolized Romy Schneider, whom she previously only knew from the romantic movies "Sissi": "The movies used to air on Christmas each year."
Diane Kruger wanted to become just like Romy Schneider, and that's why she quit modeling at the age of 22 after a short play in New York. At some point it gets boring. When the 60's trend hit the second time, I thought to myself, this is it." She flew to Paris, enlisted to an acting school and ran through a theater training including old French stage language. Of course she drank a lot of red wine in small pubs and debated about Moliere just as it was common in French movies.
There is this legend that Diane Heidkrüger only wanted to obtain the main prize, a scooter, at the "Look of the Year" competition. But it was never about jetting off on a Vespa to the next village disco for the girl. "Diane was set out to have success and to escape the constriction of the small town middle class", Heidi Gross of Model Management remembers, who used to sit in the jury at that time. Even the name Heidkrüger was sacrificed for the will to success. Even today Heidi Gross, with hanseatic sobriety, praises Kruger's "great beauty and great ambitiousness, which is accompanied with great discipline". Sounds almost like beauty too was merely a subpoint in the catalogue of German virtues.
Maybe it is the noticeable ambition which distinguishes Diane Kruger from the actresses of the nouvelle vague. Brigitte Bardot always radiated a merciless eroticism. And Romy Schneider faned a breath of excess and drama ever since she had been left by Alain Delon. "That was a tragic life", says Diane Kruger about the Francophile German, who died at the age of 43 due to heart failure.
Such a blatant fate seems unimaginable with Kruger, that young woman of almost sterile beauty, who pushes her acting career with the same strength of purpose as the modeling beforehand. Everything goes quickly with her, even the talking, the to and fro of her eyes and sometimes the nervous play with her finger.
And in relatively short cycles new men emerge in her life: even during her marriage with actor Guillaume Canet which ended in 2006, there were rumours about an affair with Ketchup heir Chris Heinz - allegedly the stepson of the presidential candidate John Kerry had to hide the liason in order not to endanger the election campaign. All the same Diane Kruger would never stage herself as a vamp like Carla Bruni: "I'm not that polygamous."
Diane Kruger isn't an actress who brings the audience to dreaming. Not yet. Maybe someone just needs to have the guts to expose the unknown world star from Algermissen to a different light. To wrap her in a mysterious aura just like the photographer of these photos. A director like Claude Chabrol, Wim Wenders or Michael Haneke, who has the guts to offer her as a projection screen to his audience. Because the secret lies in the head of the viewer. That even worked with Brigitte Bardot. And she only had a pout.
