Wolfgang Petersen was looking for someone unknown to play a famous beauty in Troy. Then he spotted Diane Kruger, as he tells Liz Howell.

TROY director Wolfgang Petersen mounted a worldwide search to find his Helen of Troy, the face that reputedly launched a thousand ships.

"Helen was very known at that time," explained Wolfgang. "She was the most beautiful woman but she was hidden away in Sparta, nobody seeing her. I thought it would be great to find a new face for the audience instead of going with an actress who was very beautiful, very known and had been seen in many parts."

He finally found his Helen in German-born Diane Kruger, a former ballet student and photographic model, who had appeared in only a couple of French-made movies before bagging this plum role.

Wolfgang was smitten when he saw her audition tape of herself and her boyfriend acting out the parts of Helen and Paris in a hotel bedroom in Canada.

"She is beautiful and she is a great actress," he said. "She has that special quality in her eyes that you cannot explain - when you look right into the soul of somebody and there's much more there than just acting and good looks."

It was a daunting prospect for the young actress, however.

"There was a little pressure, yes!" said Diane. "Not so much about the physical aspect because there's only so much you can do about that, other than spend three hours in make-up.

"Apart from what she stands for physically, it was a really challenging part for me. I had little experience prior to Troy. I had never played such an emotionally complex character and, once they cast me, I was very much more concerned with that: she needed to be very vulnerable, very sad.

"Once she's in Troy she has a constant aura or burden of guilt that surrounds her and a lot of that has to come through her eyes. There are a lot of scenes where she doesn't say anything and you still have to have that come across somehow."

But with such a wealth of experience in the ensemble cast Diane learned a lot.

"It was certainly a little overwhelming for me the first day on set," she said.

"Not so much thinking whether I could do my part but all these people had so much more experience than me and I worried that I was not as strong a performer.

"But I will definitely thank Wolfgang all my life because he made me feel really welcome. Maybe it's because he is German too but he made me feel very special, in the sense that he could sense when I was insecure and he'd come up and say something in German and that would make me feel better, which was nice.

"I certainly learned a lot. I learned to stay calm when you have to do a big scene.

"Whether it was Wolfgang or Eric Bana or Peter O'Toole, they taught me to stay calm, take my time and not be afraid to ask for time. They were very generous and they treated me as an equal, so I feel I'm incredibly blessed."

And how did she fill up all that inevitable downtime on a shoot as long as Troy?

"Ah, there was a lot of high competition backgammon going on - sort of best out of five. Numerous times I ended up as slave of the day."

Her loss obviously - but no one heard any of the other actors complaining.

Updated: 16:26 Thursday, May 20, 2004