Back in the late 1980s, when she landed her role as the bowler hat- wearing artist Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Lena Olin seemed like the natural heir to Garbo and Ingrid Bergman. She was as beautiful as they were, easily as accomplished an actress, and lived up to thecliché³ about mercurial Swedish ice queens. Somehow, though, her career in the US hasn't panned out.

Even when cast alongside Hollywood's most bankable male leads, her films tottered at the box-office. Mr Jones (in which she played the psychiatrist to Richard Gere's manic depressive) was botched in the cutting room. The original director Mike Figgis was pushed off the project. The studio wouldn't let him make the movie he wanted. They kept chopping it for him, she remembers. Finally, Gere took over. "He's a wonderful man, but I don't think it's good to cut your own film."

It was Olin's misfortune, too, to be paired with Robert Redford in Havana (1990) just as the Golden Boy's Midas-like touch deserted him. She was deeply suspicious of the way everyone catered to his whims, and argues that all the baggage surrounding such stars - the trailers, make-up artists, publicists etc - inevitably gets in the way of the work. "Everything they gave him, they had to give to me," she notes wryly. "In the end, that's not a healthy way to make a film."

Olin hasn't exactly disappeared since then, but she is no longer the cynosure she once was. When the Miramax bandwagon for Chocolat (directed by her husband, Lasse Hallstrom rolled into Berlin this week, it was relatively easy to arrange an interview with her. The media's focus was on her co-star, Juliette Binoche.

Now almost 45, Lena Olin has certainly retained her looks - the long, lustrous hair, chiselled cheek bones and steely gaze. She is far more striking in person than in Chocolat, in which she plays Josephine Muscat, the flighty, put-upon wife desperate to escape from her thuggish, dim-witted husband (Peter Stormare). For whatever reason, Hallstrom allows Binoche, not his wife, all the best close-ups.

"I never really wanted an international career," Olin protests when I ask why her career in Hollywood unravelled. "I had no clue that The Unbearable Lightness Of Being would be a successful movie. I made it for the experience." She claims she just didn't have the temperament to deal with Hollywood. The problem was her chronic lack of self- confidence. "I felt held back by fear and angst and shyness and awkwardness... I had this fear of travelling, this fear of leaving Stockholm."

After The Unbearable Lightness, she signed up to do Paul Mazursky's Enemies - A Love Story in the US and immediately regretted it. "I got sick because I really didn't want to go to New York. I've never been adventurous."

Ironically, Olin and Hallstrom now live in New York. They moved to the US in the mid-Nineties because they were tired of constantly uprooting their children whenever either had a new movie project in the States. Not that moving to America has made Olin any more gregarious. "I was extremely shy as a child and so was Lasse - and we have the shyest daughter. She won't speak to people."

There is an old Italian saying that guests are like fish: they begin to stink after three days. For Olin and her family, even one day is enough. "We had a house guest forced upon us recently - we hated that!" she grimaces.

Whether it's as tortured heroines in Strindberg plays or a demented Russian gangster Mona Demarkov in Romeo Is Bleeding, Olin is invariably cast as violent, wayward, vengeful women. "I love that kind of character, because I have access to so much fury," she declares. "I can bring it on so easily. It comes so naturally to me. I'm a kind person in general, but I've always had access to this anger." She puts this explosive temper down to her upbringing. As a kid, Olin was a demon ice hockey player. "I wasn't very big when I grew up, but I always took pride that no matter what, I can be tougher than anyone else. And I am fearless - I do not care - and so I can score the goal. It's not because I'm technically better than anybody else or faster or bigger, but because I don't care."

Her disciplinary record was roughly akin to that of Vinnie Jones. She was forever in trouble for elbowing opponents out of the way and bending the rules, "but I was so ferocious that I was always a useful player to have on the team".

"Do you still have a violent temper now?" I ask. "Yes, I do," Olin replies brusquely, her brow beginning to cloud over at what she clearly regards as an impertinent question. "When I feel threatened or afraid, I can lose my temper in an instant." Frown still in place, she adds, "It's a very useful tool for an actor to have that kind of anger, but I can control myself when I have to."

Born in Stockholm in 1955 to actor parents, Olin grew up a determined tom-boy. She refused to wear girl's clothes and always had her hair cut short. "My mother encouraged me. If I said I didn't want to go to school, she'd say 'Why do you want to waste your time going to school?' If I was going to a party and didn't know what wear, she'd say, 'You can wear a plastic bag. You'll look better than anyone else, anyway'."

Olin detested being the daughter of celebrities whose every move was scrutinised by the tabloids. To escape such attention, she decided to enrol in medical school and become a doctor. It was Ingmar Bergman, a close friend of her father, who encouraged her to apply for drama school instead. She met him on the set of Face To Face, in which she was an extra. "At the wrap party, Bergman spent the whole night talking to me. He was the one who said I had to try to get into the drama school."

She was terrified at her audition, but as soon as she started playing a character, her inhibitions disappeared. "That's what I love about acting. It's a freedom for me - an escape for me. Through a character, I can say something about myself."

She went on to work with Bergman extensively, playing Miss Julie and Cordelia on stage and appearing in his movie, After The Rehearsal. It seems now, though, that her relations with her former mentor have become distinctly frosty. A few years ago, Bergman commandeered her to appear in a production of a Strindberg play. "I couldn't do it because my kids were in school in New York," she remembers. "I've been afraid of calling him ever since. He can be very, very vengeful, especially when he cares. And I knew he cared about this. So I haven't spoken to him." This isn't her first run-in with Bergman. Early in her career, she got pregnant during rehearsals for A Dream Play. "And he was very furious about that, too... and very unforgiving as well. He was really mean to me. I think it would be OK for me to talk to him now, but you've got to leave it for a few years!"

Like Bergman, Olin and Hallstrom are not regarded with unmitigated affection back home in Sweden. They are victims of what Olin calls "the Swedish jealousy, the Royal Swedish envy which says that you're not supposed to break away or stick out." When she was nominated for an Oscar, the local journalists were at best condescending. Recently, they even gloated openly when Chocolat failed to win any Golden Globes. Even so, she and Hallstrom are planning to buy a second home back in Sweden.

She is no longer as driven about her career as in her days at the National Theatre in Stockholm. "It's not the only thing in my life," she insists. She and Lasse Hallstrom arrange their schedules so that when one is working, the other is at home looking after the kids.

He's off to Newfoundland to shoot The Shipping News and so she is now faced with a lengthy sabbatical from acting. What will we see her in next? Given her previous history, it is no surprise that her next major role is as a vampire in a new Anne Rice film, Queen Of The Damned. "But," she adds with a note of disappointment, "I only have the pleasure of biting one person in the neck."

- The Independent