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In Style, August 1, 1999

World's Sexiest Soccer Mom: She generates heat onscreen, but Lena Olin keeps the home fires burning in an old country clapboard that connects her family to their Swedish past
by Hillary J. Johnson

Some kids long to meet famous people. Lena Olin didn't have that problem. When she was a child in Stockholm, her actor parents played host to no less formidable a cast than director Ingmar Bergman and actresses Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson. "I was used to having the stars of Sweden at our house," she recalls. "But I was more drawn to the traditional mothers who had coffee with each other. I was always pleading, 'Oh, Mommy--have coffee with the other mothers!' "

Today, sitting in the library of her clapboard house in a woodsy, historic New York enclave 50 minutes north of Manhattan, she seems to have come full circle. As her husband, director Lasse Hallstrom, works quietly in a nearby study, and her little girl, clad only in pink tights, canters around her, Olin, 44, fairly approximates those "other mothers" of her childhood. Fairly. Even dressed down in black jeans and a sheer white T shirt and devoid of makeup, she is more sylvan siren than madras matron. This is, after all, an actress once termed "a lust object for the intelligentsia," a woman who has driven her co-stars--Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert Redford, Gary Oldman and Richard Gere, among others--to distraction in such films as The Unbearable Lightness of Being (in which her free-spirited Czech character had a fetish for bowler hats) and Romeo Is Bleeding (playing a murderous Russian sociopath).

Slim and surprisingly tall, sporting soft leather clogs, Olin exudes an earthy, grounded kind of sexiness, and easily reconciles any presumed tension between her responsibility to her fans and her responsibility to her family. "I want to be the traditional, everyday mom who's there for my kids, and seeing other moms, and all that," she says. "And then I want to have the opportunity to spring out of that, and show them there's another side to life, that you can have everything--you really can."

Indeed, Olin takes to the mom role with gusto. She makes a point of driving her children to and from school every day, maneuvering her brawny, celery-green Ford Expedition over the narrow, twisty lanes of Westchester County. But she confesses to a degree of trepidation and insecurity at such practical, day-to-day matters as making the correct turn and finding the right highway--fears that have plagued her for much of her life. "I'm always asking, 'How are we going to do this?' and 'Could you go with me?'--the dumbest things. But even so, I feel I have some kind of power, and that when I need it, I have it. Like an animal, almost. And if I really needed to, I could move a mountain."

Mentored by the redoubtable Bergman when she was barely past adolescence, and viewed by Swedes, at least, as the clear heir to fellow countrywomen Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, for years Olin has been sought after by such directors as Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky and Roman Polanski. In fact, Polanski cast Olin as a rich widow (opposite Johnny Depp) in his latest film, The Ninth Gate, which was filmed in Paris last summer; and she is paired with Geoffrey Rush in this month's Mystery Men, a big-budget comedy also starring Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo. But the actress didn't really register on American radar screens until 1988 with Unbearable Lightness, even though she had long been famous in Sweden as a lead player at the two-century-old Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm, performing in repertory works by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Strindberg. Olin even had a television production written specifically for her by Bergman.

In 1994 she married Hallstrom, the man responsible for such comically sweet films as My Life as a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? Laconic, gentle, self-deprecating, Hallstrom, 53, seems like the centered soul Olin might require, in contrast with the often difficult men played by her co-stars. The couple have an ebullient 4- year-old daughter, Tora, named for the Norse god of thunder, and a 13- year-old son, August, Olin's child from an earlier relationship. Olin and Hallstrom work hard at keeping everyone under one roof; for 10 weeks last winter, after he filmed the John Irving novel The Cider House Rules in Vermont, Hallstrom chose to edit the director's cut in a cottage on the Westchester property so that he could be near his family.

In fact, the clan's move to America was precipitated by August's announcement, at age 8, that he no longer wished to be tutored in hotel rooms. "We thought, Either we've got to go back to Sweden and never work abroad again, or we have to move the family," says Olin. That decision now seems momentous, but at the time, she says, "Like all major things in life, we didn't realize it. We said, 'Let's do it- -let's do this adventure.' And it was like, 'Let's go get ice cream,' even though it's 10 at night.

"Now that our kids have been in school here for a few years," Olin continues, "there's no way we can tell them, 'Now we're going to go back.' Their lives are here. So it's a big deal. You realize, My grandchildren probably won't even speak Swedish. And it makes me sad but also excited, because I feel I've done something historical, in a way. I've moved a family. I've emigrated."

Olin's small-town residency is the happy result of a movie executive's hunch that a quiet, old-money community, with houses dating to the early 1700s, would be to her liking. "When I'm living in this country, at least I have to have an old house," Olin says. Los Angeles was never an option. "They're very good at treating actors there. Everything is so--you know--'We'll deliver this, and we'll take that to your room.' But I could never live there with my family. You have a stronger sense of tradition here. And without that, everything becomes heavy and sort of filled with angst." Having found an angst-free zone, Olin is staying put. "Some people tell us, 'Oh--it's so pretty this place,' 'It's so pretty that place,' and we say, 'No, it has to be here.' This is where we landed, and this is where we have to stay."

Quotes:

"Running to all the openings, being captured by the whole idea of being a star--I think it's more difficult for a Swede to get caught up in that."

"I feel blessed and I enjoy my family. But there's still this striving to go on, which is exciting too. I think it's acting--it's an ongoing journey."

- InStyle