It's a curse being Lena Olin. Not a big curse. No tall beauty with those eyes and those cheekbones is unlucky enough to pity. Just a little curse, one that keeps the Chocolat star from working as often as an actress as sexy and exotic as she should work in the land of short memories, Hollywood.

Director Philip Kaufman cast Olin in the film that made her reputation, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), a film which also introduced Olin's Chocolat co-star, Juliette Binoche, to American audiences. Kaufman, whose most recent film is Quills, is downright apologetic about the career that landed Olin in such lesser lights as Havana, Mr. Jones and Mystery Men.

"I feel guilty for not having made more movies, simply because I should have made more movies with her in them," Kaufman said. "She's got wonderful presence, very funny, very earthy, very sexy. Very cool. She is the complete actress."

The Swedish Olin first gained fame in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander (1982). After making her Hollywood splash, she has only occasionally had roles that allowed her to shine -- such as as a Holocaust survivor in Enemies, a Love Story (1989) and as a crazed assassin in Romeo Is Bleeding (1992).

Her turn in Chocolat, the fairy-tale confection directed by her husband, Lasse Hallstrom, is her tastiest role in years.

"Hollywood has trouble with any actor from Europe, because of the accent," she said from her home in Bedford, N.Y. "That, and my own reluctance to give up a big part of my life in order to work, haven't made me a bigger star. Even if you master the language, you still are going to have that 'European' label. Your choices are limited."

She's not even Hollywood's conventional view of a Swede. Instead of blond hair and blue eyes, she's got dark hair and eyes, and just a hint of an accent.

"My looks worked in my favour, I think," she said. "I don't look like the Nordic Swedish woman, with blond hair and blue eyes. So I've played Russians, Swedes, Poles, French, women from all over the world . . . The only thing I haven't played is an American woman."

Olin, 44, was born in Stockholm and enjoyed a busy career in Sweden before Fanny & Alexander gave her the chance to work with one of the cinema's legends, Bergman, on his final film. Working with Bergman "affected everything that has come since," she said.

She acted for Sydney Pollack (Havana), Sidney Lumet (Night Falls on Manhattan) Paul Mazursky (Enemies, a Love Story), Roman Polanski (The Ninth Gate) and finally, the man who since 1994 has been her second husband, Hallstrom, famous for directing My Life as a Dog, What's Eating Gilbert Grape and The Cider House Rules.

"I knew that he had a heart of gold, just from watching his movies," she said of Hallstrom. "You can't make a movie like My Life as a Dog without having a true heart. You can't fake that, and then go home and be nasty to your friends and family."

One thing neither of them had to fake in Chocolat was a "thing" for chocolate. Olin says "men are even more obsessed with it than women."

She plays Josephine, a repressed, abused woman whose spirit revives when a wandering chocolatier (Binoche) opens a shop in a small French village.

Olin likes the film's simple message, one she says can apply even in her famously liberal homeland. Temptation is not necessarily evil.

"Don't judge. Try to embrace, instead of reject. Try to accept rather than deny people the right to be themselves. . . . That's all this film is saying. And what's wrong with that?"

Many thanks to Jinnie for this article!