Kirsten Dunst has revealed she would like to play Marlene Dietrich on the big screen.

The Melancholia actress has German roots, thanks to her father Claus, and would love to do the screen icon justice.

“I would love to play Marlene Dietrich in a movie. My dad is from Germany so I feel that would be a really cool and interesting person to play,” she said.

“But who knows? I don’t know if there are any projects or if anybody is doing anything, but I would like to,” she added.

Kirsten has a wide variety of roles on her CV, having starred in the Spider-Man films, Bring It On and Wimbledon. Her next big-screen outing is in Upside Down opposite Jim Sturgess and the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road.

“As an actress, I’m not someone who is scared of doing things that are out of the box,” she explained.

“I feel like I wouldn’t be doing Melancholia if I had any limitations within myself or to go to any places. For me, my favourite actresses are like Charlotte Rampling, people who have always stepped out of the box, from the restraints of being a certain type of woman or story, and I always liked those stories the best.”

:: Melancholia is in cinemas now.

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Kirsten Dunst, the 29-year-old actress who stars in Lars Von Trier’s new movie ‘Melancholia’, has revealed she and the director shared their own experiences of depression while working on the film. Speaking to reporters at the London premiere on Wednesday (28th September 2011), Dunst claimed hearing the controversial auteur’s experiences helped with her own struggles, reports the Independent.

The actress, who sought treatment for depression in 2008, explained, “Lars opened up to me about his experience with depression and that in turn helped me open up”. In ‘Melancholia’, Dunst plays a bride who is struggling to enjoy her wedding celebrations while at the same time planet Melancholia is heading towards earth. Von Trier courted controversy earlier this year when he was declared “persona non grata” by Cannes Film Festival bosses for claiming he could understand Adolf Hitler. Despite his notoriety, the actress revealed how much she enjoy working for Von Trier, saying, “I would have done anything with Lars. I adore working with him. There’s no one who’s communicated emotion so simply and effectively to me than Lars. And he’s funny and a joy to be around”.

Other stars to attend the premiere in Mayfair included veteran British actor John Hurt and Simon Pegg. Dunst’s co-star Alexander Skarsgard was absent.

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All hail to Kirsten Dunst for giving two of cinema’s outstanding performances this year, one tragic, one comic – and for the same film.

The tragic one you’ll see this week – in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Dunst plays a woman whose wedding is unfortunately scheduled just as the Earth is due to collide with another planet. It’s a remarkable performance – mercurial, intense, troubling – and it won Dunst the Best Actress award in Cannes this year. But she also deserves the prize for Best Straight Woman in a Farce, for Melancholia’s Cannes press conference, at which the Danish director confessed to understanding Hitler and joked about being a Nazi.

In fact, these assertions were part of a stream-of-consciousness ramble in which Von Trier also teased Dunst with a running gag about his next film. She and Melancholia co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg, he claimed, had badgered him into casting them in a four-hour porn movie, telling him: “We just want a lot of unpleasant sex.’” Dunst smiled gamely throughout, but when the Nazi remarks began, she chewed her lips in pained disbelief. Playing foil to a misfiring stand-up can’t be fun, but Dunst got in a mesmerising display of double takes, to the joy of thousands of YouTube users.

Hollywood names often shy away from controversy, but Dunst seems to enjoy the clouded response that Melancholia itself received in Cannes – it echoed her reception there with Sofia Coppola’s deliberately anachronistic Marie Antoinette, which largely mystified critics in 2006. The day after the Melancholia premiere in Cannes, I asked her whether she enjoyed hostile responses.

Kirsten Dunst is covering the November issue of Flare Magazine! A preview below and a little piece of the interview.

Kirsten Dunst’s experience with depression is far behind her, but the actress remains open about a period when she was “struggling” with the condition.

“People are embarrassed to talk about it,” Dunst, 29, tells Flare magazine. “I would never put anyone down [who] was in that kind of space.”

In fact, Dunst believes experiencing the mood disorder is perfectly normal.

“I think most human beings go through some sort of depression in their life,” she says. “And if they don’t, I think that‘s weird.”

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IN the first of two acclaimed performances by Kirsten Dunst at the 64th Cannes Film Festivalin May, a rapt audience watched as a dozen emotions — amusement, stoicism, distress, weariness, embarrassment and rue among them — played across her features in a scene in which she was required to maintain her composure at every moment and express an extraordinary range of feeling with almost no dialogue.

That particular tour de force was a one-time-only live show, the occasion being the news conference at which the depressive, eccentric Danish director Lars von Trier did his level best to torpedo the premiere of his latest film, “Melancholia,” in which Ms. Dunst stars. As he wandered into a tasteless rhetorical cul-de-sac about Nazis, Jews, Israel and his own ancestry, Ms. Dunst, seated next to him, looked on — although “looked on” doesn’t begin to cover what the blog FourFour, which posted an animated grid of her facial expressions, called the “extremely tense, wholly human experience” of “watching her negotiate her reality with what’s happening next to her.”

It’s a tribute to Ms. Dunst that the explosive reaction to the conference, which resulted in Mr. von Trier being declared persona non grata at Cannes, did not overshadow her work in the movie, which a few days later won her the festival’s best actress prize. (The film opens on Nov. 11.) It was a sweet victory for a performer who is still best known as Spider-Man’s girlfriend and whose previous accolades tended to be for things like best “lip lock” at the Teen Choice Awards.

Ms. Dunst, who seems to have been in our movie consciousness for ages but is still just 29, is happy to talk unguardedly about both Cannes performances. In a recent conversation at the Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa, near her apartment, she giggled, and sighed, and shook her head, and said of the news conference: “My reaction was like a reaction to a friend who’s basically killing himself. I was so upset that he just kept going, trying to get to a place where there’d be a laugh. And I was also very aware that I was in a roomful of journalists, and that I couldn’t say anything, although I think at one point I did whisper to him, ‘Lars, shut up, this is terrible.’ And then I was also thinking ahead, imagining, you know, ‘Party Canceled,’ ‘Dinner Canceled,’ ‘Premiere Canceled.’ ”

At 29, Kirsten Dunst has more than 25 years’ experience. But nothing can quite compare to shooting “Melancholia” with Lars von Trier, the Danish bad-boy auteur who’s almost as well known for eliciting career-best performances from his actresses as he is for igniting controversy.

Dunst stars as Justine, a depressive who notices a new planet, Melancholia, hovering above in the sky on her wedding night. Operatic in execution and flawlessly acted by its exceptional ensemble (Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Gainsboug, Alexander Skarsgard, Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt), “Melancholia” is among von Trier’s most accomplished works and by far his most commercial. Shame, then, that his team’s achievements were overshadowed by his infamous Hitler-sympathizing remarks following its world premiere in Cannes. Although the festival shunned von Trier, Cannes still chose to honor Dunst by awarding her with their Best Actress prize.

We caught up with the actress in Toronto, here for the the North American premiere sans von Trier (he doesn’t fly). Bubbly and refreshingly candid, Dunst opened up about working with von Trier, whether she plans to reteam with him and the advice she sought prior to taking on this role.

You’ve had quite the year. How would you characterize it?

I feel like 29’s a good year in general for people. I hope so. 29 has treated me well so far.

I’m guessing Cannes had something to do with that.

I had a good group of people around me in Cannes. We had a lot of fun. Obviously, it was complicated. I didn’t realize what a big deal everything would be. It was surreal. But I went away from Cannes to Istanbul right after and got out of ‘it,’ which was good for me.

It was amazing too, just a lot of feelings. I will never forget that moment. Not the Lars moment.

Winning the award.

Yeah, that moment (laughs). That was the good one. I’m always confused when people ask about Cannes—I’m like, which part?

Yeah, let’s stick mainly to the good that came out of your work with von Trier.

Thank you.

It’s a well known fact that this project was originally conceived for Penelope Cruz.

Yeah. Thank you, Penelope, for not doing this.

Appearing naked in a movie can pose special problems for a performer in the age of the Internet.

“I know that if I do nudity in a film, it’s going to be online all over the place,” said Kirsten Dunst, who appears naked in Melancholia, the sci-fi drama by Danish auteur Lars von Trier.

It is, but Dunst says she felt comfortable with it because it was essential to the plot, expressing her character’s connection with Earth in an intimate way.

“Some films, if it’s inappropriate, or feels cavalier and doesn’t make sense, I don’t like that kind of nudity,” Dunst said.

“I did it, it looks beautiful, it’s a Lars von Trier film, it’s fine. If I was in some comedy and showing my boobs, I’d be bummed. I don’t think you should show your boobs in a comedy, especially if you’re the lead. Boobs aren’t funny.”

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There’s plenty of perks to being friends with Sofia Coppola. One of them: having two of the gorgeously understated bags the director designed for Louis Vuitton. “She has the best style,” says Kirsten Dunst of Coppola, with whom she’s worked twice and whose bag — in dark blue — she’s toting around Toronto.

Dunst is here after winning a best actress award in Cannes for her devastating portrayal of a depressed bride in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Perhaps more famously, Von Trier made global headlines after a press conference there in which he made anti-Semitic remarks.

“He apologized. He took us out to dinner the next day,” says Dunst, who considers the director a close friend and the antithesis of how he came off in Cannes. He is, says Dunst, simply someone who made an unfortunate joke, and didn’t know when to stop — an idiosyncratic man who goes for long walks in the woods and drives around in a winnebago.

Her acting prize, she says, means the world to her, capping off more than 20 years of work.

“It’s such a special award. I was so honored and so grateful for it, too. I’ve been working for so long. It’s such a prestigious award,” says Dunst. “I was really lucky that they allowed the film to still be in competition. They have to deliberate about that.”

And she’s comfortable with her level of fame. “To a lot of people, I’m still the girl from Spider-Man. Which is fine,” she says.

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The Hollywood actress plays a woman called Justine in Melancholia, a science-fiction movie directed by Lars. Her performance won her the best actress prize at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival.

Kirsten managed her initial anxiety about working with the controversial director by addressing her negative thoughts.

“Until some years ago I would have had a panic attack if I had to act on his set,” she explained in an interview with Flair Italy.

“But lately I have decided to face my fears. Lars is special, different from the descriptions.”

Kirsten is renowned for her varied work in the film industry, including Spider-Man and Interview with the Vampire.

The 29-year-old star would love to work with iconic film director Quentin Tarantino, who is best known for films including Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds and Kill Bill.

“I just know that I’d love to work with Quentin Tarantino. He is my favourite director! He is a great man,” she gushed.

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