Skip to content
  • 01. Home Page
  • 02. Diane
  • 03. Photo Gallery
  • 04. Video Archive
  • 05. Press Archive
  • 06 Twitter

Tatler Magazine January 2023

Diane Kruger plays the ultimate heiress as she graces the cover of the January issue

Tatler Magazine   |   Written by Ellie Austin

It’s no surprise that Diane Kruger – the archetypal blonde beauty, the woman whose face launched a thousand ships as Hollywood’s Helen of Troy and who’s due to play Marlene Dietrich – should feel at home in her latest incarnation: as a seductive, self-centred 1930s Los Angeleno heiress.

‘I just love that whole world,’ she says, leaning forward intently on her desk. She’s at her townhouse in New York’s West Village, bright-eyed in a loose-fitting denim jumpsuit, her hair damp, her cheekbones high and sharp enough to cut glass. ‘Those femme fatale characters are always fun to play. For me, it’s kind of why I became an actor… I just think they are mysterious. They feel feel – I don’t know – dangerous at times.’

Her latest project is Marlowe, a moody film noir built around Philip Marlowe, the laconic private detective created by author Raymond Chandler. The film’s plot is adapted from The Black-Eyed Blonde, a sequel to Chandler’s books written by the Irish Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville in 2014. Kruger plays Clare Cavendish, the titular blonde: an Irish-American heiress who hires Marlowe (Liam Neeson) to investigate the disappearance of her lover. Clare’s mother, a notorious Hollywood film star, is played by Jessica Lange. It was the film’s setting of 1939 Los Angeles that initially appealed to Kruger. ‘I love that old-Hollywood feel,’ she enthuses. ‘[When] you’re on those movie sets, everything’s beautiful and those costumes and old cars… It just feels like you’re in a movie.’

Kruger, 46, is no stranger to moving in different worlds. When we speak, she’s recently landed in America with her four-year-old daughter, Nova, after four months in France and a quick pitstop in her native Germany. Two weeks later, she’s due to board a plane back to Paris to reunite with her fiancé, The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, who is shooting a TV show in the city. Then it’s on to Morocco to serve as a judge at a film festival.

There’s no hint of exhaustion at all with this shuttling about. The embrace of an itinerant lifestyle is a core tenet of her family’s identity, she explains, her voice flecked with a slight German accent. ‘We teach [our daughter] that she is at home in the world, that we have friends all over the world [and] that we really don’t have to miss people because we’re just going to go for a little bit and then come back,’ she says. ‘We’re very lucky to have homes in different places.’ (The Kruger-Reedus property portfolio also includes a home in Paris, as well as a ‘little country house’ in upstate New York.)

After spending the first 15 years of her life in Algermissen, a small village in northern Germany, Kruger was picked to represent her country in a modelling competition that had previously launched the careers of Cindy Crawford and Gisele Bündchen. She promptly moved to Paris, where she booked the cover of Vogue Paris and appeared in campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Jacobs and more. She grew close to Karl Lagerfeld, the then creative director of Chanel, who would later recruit Kruger as an ambassador for the house. When a professional restlessness set in during her early twenties, she moved into acting and beat 3,000 others to win the role of Helen in Troy, a 2004 blockbuster starring Orlando Bloom and Brad Pitt. ‘I mean, Helen of Troy obviously was based on the way I looked,’ Kruger says matter-of-factly. ‘But I don’t think they could have given it to any model, right? They wouldn’t have given it to me if I didn’t have at least a little bit of talent.’

When the film – though not her performance – was ravaged by critics, Kruger retreated to the world of European cinema. ‘I was able to continue making French movies and slowly the perception changed… people started seeing me in other things,’ she says. Since then, she has worked with Quentin Tarantino (Kruger played a film star turned undercover spy in Inglourious Basterds), dabbled in prestige TV (she starred in the US adaptation of hit Scandinavian detective series The Bridge) and karate-kicked her way into the action genre as a secret agent in all-female espionage thriller The 355.

It’s all grist for the acting mill. As for Marlowe, did the part teach Kruger anything about the world of inherited wealth? ‘Frivolous! Snobbish!’ she laughs, adding that Clare ‘grew up as a privileged white girl, who is used to having what she wants’. Inhabiting the role of Clare required perfecting the character’s contained mannerisms and clipped intonation. ‘Neil Jordan [the director] was very precise in what he wanted. He was very adamant about the rhythm of speech. There’s a different cadence. It’s not an easy dialogue to learn because it feels dated, right? I must say “Hello, Mr Marlowe” 5,000 times in a scene.’

How do you ensure that modern-day audiences connect with a depiction of such unabashed entitlement? ‘I don’t know,’ says Kruger, bristling slightly. ‘That’s a hard question. You know, it remains to be seen.’

Lively and thoughtful in her answers, Kruger responds crisply when she doesn’t want to pursue a topic. Yet she doesn’t come across as rude, rather as someone who relies on a no-nonsense efficiency to preserve her time and energy. She has guarded her personal life fiercely over the course of her career, but today, Kruger’s tone relaxes when discussing Nova. Her face lightens and she rattles off long, detailed replies, full off affectionate anecdotes and maternal declarations of pride. (‘I speak to her in German all the time. And she understands it all. She’s a very outgoing young girl.’)

Until recently, Kruger and Reedus, who met on the set of the romantic drama Sky in 2015, had refrained from sharing their daughter’s name publicly. Their stance has now changed, prompted by a children’s book Kruger wrote during lockdown. Published in October 2022, A Name from the Sky tells the story of Kruger’s complex relationship with her own name (Diane, where I’m from in Germany, is not very common and kids were making fun of me’) and how she decided on her daughter’s name. In Latin, Nova means new, which felt ‘very personal’ to Kruger and Reedus, who met when they were 39 and 46 respectively. Nova’s middle name is Tenessee, in tribute to Kruger’s discovery that she was pregnant while on a motorbike trip with Reedus in the state. While Nova is Kruger’s only child, Reedus also has a son, Mingus, 23, from a previous relationship with the supermodel Helena Christensen.

‘You know, what you’re comfortable with changes with time,’ says Kruger of her shifting approach to her daughter’s privacy. ‘When she was first born, you really try to shield her from all public gaze. I felt very strongly about that, which I didn’t know I would. But as she grew older, it didn’t…’ She pauses. ‘We have never shown her face… all of our friends obviously know what her name is and it just tied in with the book. It seems natural to tell her and the world how special she is to us and how much we put into the meaning of her name.’

Kruger wasn’t sure motherhood would happen for her. In her mid-twenties, she married the French film director Guillaume Canet, but they divorced after five years. Next came a decade-long relationship with Dawson’s Creek star Joshua Jackson that resulted in Kruger being consistently tailed by the paparazzi. The relationship disintegrated around the time of her 40th birthday. ‘I didn’t want children for a long time,’ she says. ‘I really liked my life the way it was. In my late thirties, I was starting to think about it but I wasn’t in a place in my relationship at the time – or whatever – where that was going to be a possibility and so I had kind of given up hope and I thought it was just too late. And I was OK with that. While writing this book, it definitely felt like sometimes life gives you things when you least expect them but most need them. The arrival of Nova has changed my life – our lives – in the best possible way. It’s just amazing that you thought you were one thing but you’re meant to do something completely different.’

Kruger’s own childhood was disrupted by her father’s alcoholism. An introvert who devoured books and walked her pet rabbit, Benny, around the neighbourhood on a lead, she recalls feeling like ‘an outsider. I didn’t love playing catch or football… I did ballet, which was not cool,’ she says. Embarrassment about her father’s behaviour meant that she ‘couldn’t really bring kids home’. Her parents split up when she was 13 and Kruger is now estranged from him.

The isolation she felt as a girl means that Kruger wants her own daughter to ‘always feel like she has a place everywhere’. On a practical level, this has meant enrolling her in the international system of Montessori schools. ‘Wherever I go, I put her in school – I don’t want her to feel like her life is on hold when I’m working or Norman is working.’ At home, work talk with Reedus is kept to a minimum. ‘This is maybe the first time in my adult life that I’m in a relationship where I respect him to do his thing,’ Kruger says serenely. ‘I want him to feel he can do anything he’s interested in and I would support that. And I expect that the other way around [from him].’

Now, feeling established in Hollywood (‘I’ve had more interesting offers [of roles] in the last two years than I feel like I’ve ever had in my career’) has given Kruger the confidence to speak out about pay inequality in the industry. It’s been on her mind for a while; in 2017, she remarked that, in the United States at least, she had never been paid as much as a male co-star. Five years on, is the industry’s gender gap closing? ‘I don’t know,’ she replies carefully. ‘I think it’s getting better, for sure. There’s definitely a space that has been created. There’s always a danger of regressing but I trust that the fierce ladies of Hollywood will speak up. I think there’s more transparency.’

On average, Kruger reads 10 to 15 scripts a week, with the goal of finding meaty roles for herself (she hates horror films, she says, and avoids ‘playing victims’). She’s recently signed on to play the famously fierce Marlene Dietrich in a TV series about the German actress and singer’s life. She will also executive-produce the show. Given the recent backlash against Blonde, Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe biopic, which some have accused of exploiting Monroe’s trauma, how will Kruger approach the retelling of Dietrich’s story? ‘Obviously, the aim is to honour her legacy and be respectful of that, which is one of the reasons why we’re making a miniseries and not a movie because, those nuances, you have more time to tell that story [with a series]. You need to tell the full story or not do it at all. Otherwise, you just make a documentary about Marlene Dietrich and her accomplishments, right? It’s Fatih Akin directing [Akin and Kruger previously worked together on the 2017 German language film In The Fade]. He has a real knack for writing women. He’s sensitive to the idea of [Dietrich] being an immigrant to America. We’re not going to start filming until the end of next year, so we have a lot of time to figure it out.’

Away from acting, Kruger is ‘very political’ and has posted on Instagram about the need for tougher gun legislation in America. ‘It’s something I’m really concerned with in my everyday [life] living in New York,’ she says, her voice tightening. ‘The thought of having my kid go to school and not be safe is very concerning to me. That shouldn’t even be a political issue. That should just be common sense.’

Despite feeling less anonymous in Paris than she does in New York (‘Paris is a smaller city… I started out in France, so a lot of people know me there for French movies’), Kruger seems more at ease in Europe than America. Currently, in New York, ‘There’s a lot of crime, a lot of dirt everywhere. The news is Trump, Trump, climate change. It’s oppressive sometimes. Moving to Europe – it’s not like they don’t have their problems – but it just felt like we were getting out of our bubble. It’s a change of scenery that has been really good for us.’

France also has the added advantage of being a country where women are celebrated as they age. ‘When you see people out in restaurants, it seems that there are so many attractive women of all ages. I’m sure there is sexism and the same issues that Americans face, but I know a lot of women [in France] who are happy with their second, third marriage. They have boyfriends way into their fifties.’

As for Kruger’s future happiness? She doesn’t look ahead. ‘I can’t,’ she says, then reconsiders: ‘Usually, reality is better than what you think it’s going to be, you know?’ Kruger shrugs, that innate Parisian chic much in evidence. It’s the same élan that imbues her heiress, Clare Cavendish: sophisticated, self-possessed, an enigma.

Related

Powered by MND Press Library
Welcome to Diane Kruger Network - Your newest online source for German Actress Diane Kruger. Diane can be seen as Abigail Chase in the National Treasure movies, Lisa in Wicker Park, Helen in Troy, Bridget von Hammersmark in Inglourious Basterds among others. Diane's upcoming movies include Marlowe, Joika, Visions, Longing & Butterfly in the Typewriter. Keep checking back as we bring you the latest on Diane & her projects.

Family Sites

Co-Star Affiliates

Saoirse Ronan
Sebastian Stan
Sebastian Stan
Talia Ryder
You 1
Accepting

Elite Affiliates

Alicia Vikander
Caitriona Balfe
Danielle Rose Russell
Emilia Clarke
Felicity Jones
Gemma Chan
Hayley Atwell
Lili Reinhart
Lily James
Nathalie Emmanuel
Néstor Carbonell
Perrie Edwards
Rachel Brosnahan
Rose Williams
Sophie Turner
Accepting

Latest & Upcoming Projects

  • Joika
    Joika
    Tatiyana Volkova
    Post-Production
    American ballet dancer Joy Womack is accepted into Moscow's infamously tough Bolshoi Ballet Academy, with the dream of becoming a great ballerina.
    IMDb
  • Marlowe (2023)
    Marlowe (2023)
    Clare Cavendish
    Releases: February 3rd 2023
    As bad business and loneliness is taking its toll on private detective Philip Marlowe, a beautiful blonde arrives and asks him to find her ex-lover, which proves to be just a small part in a bigger mystery.
    IMDb
  • Visions
    Visions
    Estelle
    Post-Production
    Follows a brilliant airline captain, Estelle, who has a perfect life with her husband Guillaume, a renowned doctor. Something is about to change as Estelle falls in love with Ana and starts and intense affair.
    IMDb
  • Longing
    Longing
    Alice
    Post-Production
    A bachelor is forced to evaluate his life choices when he discovers that an ex-girlfriend gave birth to a son he never knew 20 years ago and that the boy has died. As he explores his dead son's life and gets to know him vicariously through those closest to him, Daniel is forced to evaluate the life choices that have led him to this crossroad.
    IMDb
  • Butterfly in the Typewriter
    Butterfly in the Typewriter
    Patricia Rickels
    Pre-Production
    The story of troubled author John Kennedy Toole and his struggle to bring his comic masterpiece "A Confederacy of Dunces" to print.
    IMDb

Featured Album

Troy Promotional Photoshoot 2004
Troy Promotional Photoshoot 2004

Latest Videos

  • WMF Perfection Series Coffee Machines TV Spot
    Added December 27, 2022
  • Tatler Magazine January 2023
    Added December 26, 2022
  • Jimmy Kimmel Live! April 2022
    Added May 22, 2022
  • First Love Official Trailer
    Added May 22, 2022
  • 2022 SXSW Festival: Swimming With Sharks Variety Studio Interview
    Added May 22, 2022

Quoting Diane

“It's fun being one of the boys. It's fun to have a character that's rough and gets down and dirty and not to be this precious girl who just sits in the corner and just sort of stands by the action.”
MORE QUOTES

A Name From The Sky


Purchase 'A Name From The Sky'

Site Information

  Maintained by: Niamh
  Online since: December 2021
  Contact: Contact Form
  Site Visitors:
  Online:

Diane Kruger Network is 100% unofficial. The site is fan run, for the fans. We do not know Diane or her management. All original text and graphics belong to Diane Kruger Network (unless stated otherwise), all pictures, scans, screencaps etc. are copyright to their original owners. This site is non-profit, and is in no way trying to infringe on the copyrights or businesses of any of the entities. All content posted up on this site is used under the Fair Use Copyright Law 107. All photos are copyright to their respective owners. Tags & watermarks on photos exist only for promotional purposes & do not imply ownership. If you would like something removed please contact me.

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
© 2021 - 2023 Diane Kruger Network • Theme by MonicaNDesign • Powered by WordPress
Diane Kruger Network is 100% unofficial. The site is fan run, for the fans. All original text and graphics belong to Diane Kruger Network (unless stated otherwise), all pictures, scans, screencaps etc. are copyright to their original owners. This site is non-profit, and is in no way trying to infringe on the copyrights or businesses of any of the entities. All content posted up on this site is used under the Fair Use Copyright Law 107. All photos are copyright to their respective owners. Tags & watermarks on photos exist only for promotional purposes & do not imply ownership. If you would like something removed please contact me.