Flare article
Before Arcand or Cannes clamoured for her, Kruger was a catwalk star, modeling for top design houses such as Yves Saint Laurent, Dior and Armani. But despite landing multiple magazine covers such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue (as well as FLARE in 2000), she discovered that becoming a top model wasn't a fulfilling full-time job: "You're getting all dolled up and just holding crazy poses for hours at a time. It takes forever [and] it's just boring." Today, her focus is on acting, although she cherry-picks modeling jobs for select fashion-related campaigns. For example, she is now the face - and muse - of Chanel's Paris-Biarritz handbag collection, a collaboration she was happy to participate in due to a famous longstanding friendship.
"I met Karl [Lagerfeld] when I was around 17 years old," she says of the legendary Chanel designer. "When I had my first big première for Troy at the Cannes Film Festival, he designed an haute couture dress for me. I actually still have the drawing, which says, For my beautiful Helen, your friend Karl. His designs are stunning and I wear them all the time." In fact, the two German expats are neighbours in Paris and their street served as the backdrop for the Paris-Biarritz bag campaign. Kruger says she "walked down one morning and we started shooting and it was done in two hours."
These days, Kruger, whom In Style called one of 2006's "most spectacularly clad women," is more likely dressing for the red carpet than a photo shoot. "Finding the right dress is madness in Hollywood," she says. "As a model, you never really do red carpet. It's very different to dress for events than it is to dress to be fashionable. Some dresses just don't work for photographic purposes. I learned that the hard way."
The strong-willed Kruger pushes the envelope with her choice of film roles, too, balancing her work in Hollywood blockbusters with smaller independent and foreign films. "It's a personal reward that you get out of [smaller films]. Maybe fewer people will go see this movie, but this way I can push my boundaries and push myself as an actor to new limits," she says.
Her ever-expanding résumé has certainly been bolstered by her enviable ability to act in no less than three differ-ent languages: English, French and German. In her most recent French foray, she collaborates with Arcand in a poignant black comedy. "I'm a huge fan of Denys Arcand. He's very well known and very respected in France. I've seen all of his movies, so when he called to ask if I wanted to come meet him and speak about a project, I didn't have the script, but I immediately said yes." In the film, Kruger plays an imagined movie star who appears in the fantasies of a hapless Quebec bureaucrat. "I show up in his living room, in the suburbs, dressed in evening gowns all of the time. It's really funny."
