Blooming in a desert

by BAZ BAMIGBOYE, Daily Mail

Last updated at 10:03 15 April 2005


Eva Green laughs then licks her lips suggestively on recalling what she did after spending five months shooting Ridley Scott's blockbuster Kingdom Of Heaven opposite Orlando Bloom.

"I went to Rome, because I was scared of the reality of going to my home in Paris. I went to a restaurant, ordered a plate of pasta and had them shave black truffle over it. It was heavenly," she sighed.

Eva, who shot to fame in Bernardo Bertolucci's movie The Dreamers, plays a princess in Ridley's epic.

She is sister to the Christian king Baldwin IV, a monarch with a vision of the Middle East, between the second and third crusades, becoming a 'kingdom of heaven'.

Instead, as you can imagine, all hell breaks loose and Bloom (seen here leading Eva's horse) goes into battle.

But I'm not quite sure how it all turns out because I was allowed to see only selected footage, as the film hadn't been completed. It all looked very epic . . . and bloody. Eva was keen to do a bit of sword play. "This is not the pretty, stupid princess," she told me.

"She's got grit. She's a mother, she's got a terrible husband and a loving brother who is very ill, so she's not like a princess in a fairy tale.

"However, Ridley wouldn't let me go into battle. He thought about it for a minute and then said

"I was hired a week before shooting. I'd just got back to Paris from Los Angeles. I got on the Eurostar and came to London for rehearsals and then I was on a set in Morocco.

"I didn't know my lines. I was scared. I am French, so although my English is good, it wasn't perfect, so I had to work on that, too, and for the first few days I was a mess."

But Ridley looked after her. "He helped me and the cast, all boys except for the make-up and hair people. I had no competition!" she joked.

"The men were generous and supportive. I was like the baby."

The film opens in the UK next month.

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