Her odyssey has just begun

Paris —  She enters the dining room of the Hotel Costes, and nobody looks up. This is a place where exotically garbed hostesses outshine the guests -- assorted stars in jeans. Fitted with a sumptuous Moroccan health club, the hotel is a discreet hangout for the famous. Diane Kruger is living her last anonymous hours, before the release of “Troy.” Known as Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” and Brad Pitt’s “Troy,” the original Troy was the battleground of Homer’s Iliad. And anonymous Diane Kruger plays Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships. In the film, she is flanked by Orlando Bloom as handsome Paris, and Pitt as cunning Achilles.

Playing Helen of Troy, she says simply, was a challenge. “The whole project was. Even Brad felt we were doing something special, an old-time great story, and I never thought they would really consider anybody outside America for the part.” So far, the actress, who came to France from Germany at age 16 to model, has made half a dozen films. She commutes between Paris, London, New York, and L.A., and works out at the Costes health club when she is in town. “I like it here. Roman Polanski comes by, it’s that kind of trendy.” Kruger, who looks like Romy Schneider -- a true blond, indigo blue eyes tinged with melancholy, and velvet skin -- is one of the new faces of European cinema.

Over her favorite lunch, penne a l’arrabiata, she talks about her long season in Los Angeles, her long siege making “Troy.” Her English is cool American, and her French too could fool you. She is 27, and wears her ambition on her sleeve. “I’m not American and I’m not French, I didn’t know anything about Hollywood. It’s so outside my league, I didn’t even feel the pressure.”

This freshness works in her favor. She can come out with things like “Isabelle Adjani is a nice lady and still an attractive woman,” and sound perfectly un-catty, or a remark like “Troy was a difficult book to adapt” and sound naive, but not a fool. Because she is not. “I love Oscar Wilde,” she says, “because I love the way he writes English, and I like books like Patrick Susskind’s ‘Perfume’ where a lot happens.”

In “Troy,” a lot happens, and since its completion, the bids have poured in. She is determined to go on making small, independent movies in French and in English, as well as the big ones, and she will do what it takes: switch languages, accents; gain and lose weight; train to sing opera, as she is doing for an upcoming French project. “I would do anything for a part,” she says, “nearly anything. Being in movies doesn’t mean being pretty.

“You become an actress because you love living different lives. It’s the best job in the world.”

A newcomer’s inspiration

These days, it means press junkets and having a Balenciaga antique gown fitted for the Met ball in New York, and a Lagerfeld for “Troy’s” Cannes festival gala. She’s not complaining. “I like getting out of jeans, they’re a boring uniform, and I love wearing antique gowns.” She identifies with the Viennese-born Schneider, her favorite actress. She saw those Claude Sautet movies of the ‘70s, such as “Les Choses de la Vie,” in which Michel Piccoli drives his Alfa Romeo off the road, tragically distracted by Schneider, and Kruger is fascinated by the actress’ own tragic end. “I wanted to become an actress,” she says, “because of that movie.” Last year, she was flown to Cannes from Malta, where “Troy” was on location, and awarded a prize as most promising newcomer. At a dinner, she found herself next to Piccoli. “I didn’t dare tell him how much he inspired me. I wrote him a letter, but I’m not sure he got it.”

Yet, her dream is to play not in epic tragedy, but in an old-time romantic comedy, act Hepburn to Cary Grant: “Those actors had such class! It would be a challenge to do comedy, to make people laugh would be so great. I think I have a dark side, so the dark parts come easier to me.”

Helen, kidnapped by Paris and taken to Troy, was not a happy woman.

“In most of my scenes, I was crying or unhappy, but I tried to make her real, to make people see how young and vulnerable she was. She must have cursed her beauty because it didn’t do her any good: She was married off against her wishes when she was 16, and lived in a golden cage with a man three times her age she didn’t love.”

Kruger grew up in the countryside near Hildesheim, “which is really near nothing much. My mom always worked, so I was pretty independent. She thought it would be ideal if I became an accountant. ‘Everybody needs an accountant,’ she said. ‘It’s a job with a future.’ ” Her parents separated, and she has been out of touch with her father for the past 10 years.

She says she always knew that she would do something nonacademic, and studied dance for 11 years before a knee injury interfered with her career -- “It’s a terrible life, if you don’t make it as a prima ballerina.” But she still has the dancer’s stamina. “If I have children, I will have them do dance -- it builds character.” She is not in a hurry to have children; her own childhood is not that far behind.

“I always lived a very disciplined life and was never tempted by drugs. So my mom didn’t worry when I came to Paris. I’ve done some stupid things, but I’ve never been tempted by really crazy things. She knew I wouldn’t, like, date a 58-year-old man.”

She met actor-director Guillaume Canet (“The Beach”) and starred in his first film, “Mon Idole,” playing a tough cookie to his innocent toy-boy character. The couple share a flat on the Quai beyond the Eiffel Tower, and a house outside Paris. While she was filming in Hollywood, they were separated for months, which she talks about with equanimity, adding that she was also separated from her cat: “Traveling is hard on both of us, but that’s the life you choose. If we are meant to be together, we’ll stay together. There’s no use being jealous.” Kruger likes to be on the move; she is restless after six months in one place. “It’s my big quality and my defect too. I hate being in one place for long. Maybe it comes from modeling.”

Carefree days of yore

As I try to match her giant steps, we cross the Tuileries gardens, to the Place de la Concorde. She takes this walk often. Today, she reminisces about the early Paris years when she shared an apartment with other models on a crooked, ancient street by the Eglise Saint Roche. “We had no money, but we had fun.” She points out the church where she once lit a candle, a small prayer in hope of landing a job. “I remember apologizing to God -- he was going to think I was not a nice person. But I wanted that job.” The night before her July 15 birthday, she and her friends made a midnight excursion in the Tuileries, to catch the Bastille Day fireworks.

“It was such a happy time,” she says. “I remember feeling so carefree.” She was 17.

When she enrolled in the Cours Florent, the top French acting school, life became more complicated. She played Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet, “I had to learn ancient French,” she grimaces. She never studied French and feels more at ease with English, which all her friends speak. During post-production of “Troy,” she dubbed Helen into German and French. “There are just too many words in French ... it took forever.” The cast had been coached to speak in a “pure English accent” because the idea was that if you couldn’t have ancient Greek, English would be best, or at least better than an American accent. “Brad did well with it; he does well with accents.”

The four months she spent doing screen tests for Helen tested her stamina. Petersen had an international casting call out for the part. “Wolfgang had been looking for Helen all over the world. When I heard, I filmed myself with a digital camera in a hotel room, and once I got the part, he told me that that first test was the best because of this weird lighting. But it was a long process before they decided, and I had to put on weight to look voluptuous.”

She did two other films while she was in Hollywood: “Wicker Park,” a remake of Gilles Mimouni’s French movie, “L’Appartement” -- “a Hitchcock kind of thriller,” she says -- and “National Treasure” with Jon Voight, Nicolas Cage and Harvey Keitel. “I loved going from a small film to a huge film like ‘Troy,’ even if it was hard because there were scenes I didn’t know at all how to play, I just didn’t have the experience. But Wolfgang was so welcoming.”

She thinks that having the same native language as Petersen helped. “We spoke German sometimes on the set when I was unsure of something.” She had seen “Das Boot,” the film that launched his career, and “The NeverEnding Story,” which he also directed: “My favorite movie growing up. I can still quote lines from it.”

Her mother and grandparents are coming to Berlin for “Troy’s” German premiere. “I think they have no idea what my job as an actress is,” she says. “How hard I work -- they think that I hang out by a pool in Los Angeles.” She laughs. “But they know they had to let me do it. My mom knew that I would hate her the rest of my life if she had said no: I was a very determined child.”

Joan Dupont can be contacted at calendar@latimes.com.