She may be coolly beautiful, but film star Diane Kruger is far from unapproachable, as she gushes to Jane Gordon about her heart-throb boyfriend, high-heel wobbles and almost killing Sharon Stone. Diane Kruger has a thing about shoes. Last night, at a glittering dinner to celebrate the launch of the new Calvin Klein perfume Beauty (for which she is the face), she was wearing a pair of shoes so perilously high that she spent much of the evening clinging to her boyfriend – the actor Joshua Jackson – as if he were a human Zimmer frame. For our interview this morning, the 34-year-old actress has an equally scary pair of platform heels, so elevated that she navigates her way across the hotel room as if walking a tightrope.

“Actually, they aren’t as high as the ones I was wearing last night. I wore those to a dinner in Paris last week and I nearly killed myself. I was like, “Josh, hold on to me!”’ she says as she reaches the safety of a chair.

Shoes have, Diane admits, got her into quite a lot of trouble both on and off screen. As anyone who saw her in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds will know, it was a pair of high heels that prompted the downfall of her character Bridget von Hammersmark, by exposing her as a spy. And last year, she confesses with a grin, her heels almost caused a major incident when she and 32-year-old Josh were guest stars at a Los Angeles charity event being hosted by Sharon Stone.

“Josh and I were auctioning a two-wheeled Segway personal transporter, and I decided to get on it in very high heels and lost control. I nearly killed Sharon Stone – I ran over the train of her dress and she almost fell off the stage. I could see the headlines: “Diane Kruger kills Sharon Stone”,’ she says, laughing with horror at the memory.

One of the most surprising things about Diane (apart from her shoes and her willingness to talk – rather a lot – about Josh) is a sense of humour you don’t associate with the German ice queen whose first major role was as Helen of Troy alongside Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom in the 2004 film Troy. But these days there is very little about the actress that betrays her Teutonic origins, which might explain why Quentin Tarantino initially refused to cast her in Inglourious Basterds because he didn’t believe she was German. Diane appreciates the irony of the fact that achieving success in Hollywood by erasing her accent to gain ‘American’ speaking parts almost prevented her from winning her dream role. Convincing Tarantino that she would be perfect as von Hammersmark (he had Nastassja Kinski in mind) involved her flying, at her own expense, to Berlin and learning 30 pages of the script – which switches from German to English – in both languages.

Today, talking at breakneck speed in a mid-Atlantic accent, she is relishing her growing star status in America – we see her next in the highly anticipated thriller Unknown White Male alongside Liam Neeson and reprising her successful role as archivist Dr Abigail Chase in the Disney adventure National Treasure 3. A fashion natural after her modelling years, she is also loving the offshoots of her fame such as her role as the face of Calvin Klein Beauty (she is dressed from top to toe in Calvin Klein). But in a celebrity-obsessed world that loves two for the price of one, it cannot be denied that her relationship with Joshua Jackson has done much to raise her profile.

“They [paparazzi] do take pictures of us when we are in New York or LA, but it doesn’t bother us because we don’t have super-interesting lives for them. We don’t go out a lot and I certainly don’t go to clubs without any underwear on. We love the outdoors, we love cycling and hiking and we are both very green – not pursuits that the paparazzi tend to be interested in.”

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