Lena Olin was a tomboy. She didn't want to be pretty. She cut her hair short and refused to wear dresses. She preferred sports to dolls and fighting to tea parties.

She changed once she turned 13 - no one who's seen "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Enemies, A Love Story" would question that. But watch those films, the way she uncorks a wine bottle with her teeth or the erotic tension between Olin and other women and you'll see a masculine spirit that runs much deeper than a bowler hat.

And she hasn't stopped looking for new ways to bring that quality into her professional life. As a Swedish actress, she's been compared to Garbo, but when Olin speaks of tackling classic roles it's not only "Camille" that's on her mind.

"One of my first stage parts was in a comedy called 'Able Drugger,' an English comedy," Olin, dressed in jeans and a simple, white blouse, recalled in a recent interview. "I played a man and I enjoyed that. I very much would like to play a man. I'd like to do 'Hamlet."'

Hamlet is a tragic male, incapable of making up his mind. But Olin might be too tough as the Danish prince. Her characters - Sabina in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and Masha in "Enemies, A Love Story" - are erotic cynics: intelligent, complex, highly sexual, painfully self-aware.

There's something otherwordly about them; they're objects of desire yet very much alone. They make their own rules. Fair play no longer matters; they've been hurt too often.

Sabina is an avant-garde artist living in Czechoslovakia during the 1968 uprising, a free spirit in an oppressed country, the mistress of a seductive doctor who can make tugging a curtain seem pornographic. Masha, for which Olin received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress, is an embittered Holocaust survivor, a force of life but an even stronger force of death.

In "Havana," her new film, Olin plays Roberta Duran, a Swede trapped in a "Casablanca"-like love triangle, torn between American playboy-gambler Robert Redford and Cuban revolutionary Raul Julia. Roberta - or Bobbi as she's called -is somewhat softer than Masha or Sabina. She's more passive, easier to manipulate and, for Olin, an easier person to like.

"Sabina's so bored with life, so fed up with life," Olin said. "And Masha's so distraught. She was hard to live with. I like to be able to close the door to the studio, but it's very difficult with some characters. I also felt very vulnerable when I did Bobbi. I wanted to be good when I did Bobbi, and I kept that with me.

"Masha was very hard to come back to every night, to sleep with every night. You touch areas in yourself that I don't think are very healthy to touch."

Olin, 35, was born in Stockholm. Her parents were actors, her father, Stig Olin, appearing in Ingmar Bergman's classic "The Seventh Seal." But they divorced when she was little and for all her all spirit, she remembered herself as self-conscious and insecure, more at home with inner thoughts than with the outside world.

"I was a weird child and I still see things differently," she recalled in a soft voice, smiling shyly. "I always remember very strange things. I have a capacity to walk in an apartment where there are boxes and papers, and someone will say, 'Excuse the boxes and papers.' And I'll say, 'Oh, I didn't see that.' I think I concentrate on other things, small things that can be revealing."

Acting was the perfect way to express herself, and at age 20 Olin entered the Royal Dramatic Theater School, joining Bergman's famed company of players. On stage, she starred in the plays of Shakespeare, Strindberg and Chekhov and she also worked with Bergman on films, appearing in "After the Rehearsal" and "Fanny and Alexander."

Olin sees nothing peculiar or silly about her tomboy roots. It was a phase to build upon rather than outgrow, a yearning to be in touch with all sides of herself, a rebellion against the rules that men and women are supposed to obey that went beyond mere role-playing.

"If I ever had a daughter I'd bring her up the same way, encourage her to do what I did," said Olin, a single mother whose son, August, is named after Strindberg.

"I think it's important for everyone to stay open, not to be afraid, and if you push that way, I think that makes a difference for an actor. The great thing about Marlin Brando, he's very macho and all of that, but there's a huge woman in there as well."

Many thanks to Jinnie for this article!