There is a particular watchfulness to Diane Kruger, a sense that she is always taking in more than she reveals. On screen, that quality translates into characters who rarely ask for sympathy yet linger long after the credits roll. Over the last two decades, she has built a career that bridges European auteur cinema and Hollywood spectacle, with a filmography that is both high-profile and quietly exacting.

Many audiences first encountered her in large-scale studio films that quickly entered the popular imagination. In Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, she played Helen opposite Brad Pitt, tasked with inhabiting a figure weighed down by centuries of mythology. Around the same time, she became familiar to global audiences as Dr. Abigail Chase in National Treasure and its sequel, holding her own at the center of a major adventure franchise led by Nicolas Cage.

Her collaborations with directors on both sides of the Atlantic deepened that impression of range and curiosity. She stepped into Quentin Tarantino’s world as German film star Bridget von Hammersmark in Inglourious Basterds, part of an ensemble that went on to receive the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. That film introduced her to a new segment of cinephiles and cemented her place in contemporary film culture as an actor who can inhabit stylized universes without losing emotional truth.