German-born Diane Kruger — Helen of Troy, or double agent Bridget von Hammersmark of Inglourious Basterds — had one of those years that would force any faint-hearted person to give in to despair, but what the actress did is play the toughest role of her career and come out on top.

“I felt like I was drowning,” Kruger told Vulture in New York where she divides her time with France. She lost her grandmother and her stepfather, and ended her 10-year relationship with Dawson’s Creek actor Joshua Jackson.

But then in April 2016, she received a script from German-Turkish director Fatih Akin for In the Fade. The role was one of a woman whose Turkish husband and son are killed in a neo-Nazi terrorist attack.

The actress immersed herself into six months of prep work, reported Vulture, meeting 30 families of murder victims “on her own” as Akin said.

Akin had trusted Quentin Tarantino’s instinct to cast Kruger in the 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, and he wasn’t proved wrong.

Kruger attended support groups, met people who lost children and spouses to murder and suicide. She moved to Hamburg, the film’s setting, specifically to the Turkish neighbourhood where her character, Katja, lives with herfamily and started working on the look. By the time shoot began in October, the actress had so internalised the stories she’d heard that “sometimes I felt I wasn’t acting,” she said.

She will soon be headed to the Golden Globes next week as In the Fade (German name, Aus dem Nichts, meaning “from nothing”) competes in the foreign-language-film category. It’s also one of the nine foreign films shortlisted for the Academy Awards.

It is her first German film, after she left her native country 25 years ago, long before she’d ever dreamed of becoming an actor.