WHAT WITH THE WEST Wing wearing thin the Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell chatter of its characters, and 24 locked into the tedium of its real-time concept, the espionage TV series Alias is the networks' best drama by far. But ever since the debut a year and a half ago, it's always been in danger of spinning its web a little too intricately. As a result, despite hair-raising suspense, labyrinthine intrigue, supernatural omens, left-field satire, hyper-dysfunctional family conflict, a fairly hip soundtrack, and babe du jour Jennifer Garner in bondage gear, the show has hung on to survival only by its fingernails. Sometimes you wonder if even the series' creators have kept track of all the conspiracies and counterconspiracies, although to their credit, at every point that you think Alias is going to plummet from the weight of the convolutions, it recovers not just by scrambling back up the side of the precipice but by leaping to a higher one. At the same time, it's steadfastly maintained a single propulsive narrative that's run throughout, having to do with the truly twisted relationship between Garner's double agent, Sydney Bristow, and her parents. In last season's final moments, when Sydney came face-to-face with "the Man"--the evil mastermind behind everything--in fact the Man turned out to be a woman, and not just any woman but the mother Sydney thought was dead. What actress, lurking in the shadows, could possibly live up to such mythic nefariousness?

Upon first seeing Lena Olin in 1988's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a lot of guys of a certain age and intelligence must have wondered where she'd been all their lives. Supremely self-possessed, marshaling her sensuality to her own ends, languid in a black bowler handed down from Sally Bowles, filled with ideas about politics and culture while splayed naked in bed or on top of a mirror, Olin's free-spirited Czech bohemian, Sabina, was a sex bomb for grown-ups. "Seriously beautiful," Robert Redford would call her in another movie a couple of years later; and recalling a bygone glamour, Olin's was certainly the beauty of a serious man's serious woman. Already in her early thirties, she wasn't a starlet, she wasn't going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone's "Hot" issue, and if she ever had been a starlet, well, she was an Ingmar Bergman starlet, which is an oxymoron. The daughter of a Swedish movie star, she had no interest in acting early on, working instead as a teacher before Bergman lured her first to Stockholm's Royal Theater and then into small parts in his Face to Face and Fanny and Alexander. These were followed by a more prominent role in 1984's After the Rehearsal, the film that caught the eye of Philip Kaufman. Born in the wrong country in the wrong decade, an often great, always bold director who had made The Right Stuff and would go on to Henry & June and Quills, Kaufman was probably the only American alive who thought adapting Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being made any sense. Compared with Kundera, The Hours is a Tom Clancy story.

Not that many people saw Unbearable Lightness, but Olin managed to create a sensation in it anyway Hollywood took note. Soon she was in two high-profile American films, Paul Mazursky's Enemies, A Love Story and Sydney Pollack's Havana. Both were earnest, intelligent, and not particularly remarkable otherwise, although Enemies had its champions, and for her performance in it, as a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps living in the Bronx, Olin received a New York Film Critics prize and an Oscar nomination. On paper Havana must have looked like a sure thing. A romantic epic set in Batista's besieged 1959 Cuba, with Olin playing opposite Redford, the movie never took off, and though no one said so, Hollywood may have blamed the new chick. In a way Hollywood was right, although for reasons it wasn't smart or concerned enough to figure out. But by then it was obvious that the most formidable actors, from Daniel Day-Lewis (in Unbearable Lightness) to Ron Silver (in Enemies), had trouble holding their own in scenes with her--even when she wasn't doing anything more startling than sitting at a vanity putting on her makeup, something about her commanded attention--so although Pollack had Havana rewritten for her, all the personality of the writing went into Redford's disaffected gambler. Then, having safely fortified their male superstar, the filmmakers racked their brains over a biography for Olin's character and, in a burst of inspiration, decided to make her ... an actress from Sweden. Nonetheless, in a scene where she gazes at the body of a teenager who's been killed by the Cuban secret police and does nothing but relate the bare facts of the dead girl's life, she showed what she could do with so little.

IN ALL OF HER FILMS OLIN'S ROLES had a political context, or subtext or pretext or one of those texts. None of her characters was deeply political per se, in some ways least of all in Havana, where the actress from Sweden dabbling in revolution sometimes seems exactly as naive and dilettantish as Redford accuses her of being. But these women were either navigating or surviving the ravages of history, and all were engaged by it, if only just enough to be wary and a little bit cynical; at the same time Olin always conveyed a certain serenity about her very discontent, as well as an unspoken resistance to becoming a pawn for anyone or any cause. Lots of things might hinge on what others around her did, but her sense of herself was never one of them. This made Olin as close to a Modern Woman as we're probably going to see in Hollywood movies, and of all the kinds of women that Hollywood likes (sort of) or feels (vaguely) comfortable with, modern isn't one of them.

Add to this the contradiction of playing a Modern Woman in what were all period pieces and you can see why the studios and the public were confused. Since Olin has always given the impression of an actor whose dignity holds her ambition in check, it's hard to know how much was Hollywood's choice and how much was Olin's when the major stardom that seemed her destiny in the '90s didn't happen. As gratifying as it was to see her a few years ago in her husband Lasse Hallstrom Chocolat--not because it was a good movie but because it was a popular one that got her noticed again--it was also a little sad, because so quickly she seemed to have become one of those actors who's not in enough films and is doomed to always be better than the ones she's in. I feel guilty even bringing up last year's Queen of the Damned. She's earned the right not to have it mentioned at all.

Only in retrospect does her most flamboyant role of the last decade seem important. Romeo Is Bleeding (1994) was just one of the many disposable movies Quentin Tarantino wrought, but in it, as a Russian hit woman who lops off her arm so she can replace it with a robotic one, Olin completely upstaged such introverts as Gary Oldman, Juliette Lewis, and Will Patton. Seeing Olin in Romeo Is Bleeding, future Alias creator J.J. Abrams must have wondered where she'd been all his life. A couple of months ago, with every, plot turning back on itself and whatever you thought you knew turning out to be what you didn't know, Alias suddenly ground-zeroed most of its premises in a way that left things up for grabs. Whether this was just good creative instincts, or an act of desperation to improve ratings with a television audience that couldn't figure out what was going on, doesn't matter, especially since it was the show's star-crossed luck that the crucial episode aired right after the Super Bowl. This meant it was on two hours too late for the East Coast and an hour too early for the West. I just happened to turn on the TV halfway through, and must report with deep sorrow that I missed Jennifer in both the celebrated black and red lingerie scenes. Garner can neutralize whole rogue CIA outfits on her own but so far is no match for the idiots who run ABC. In any event suddenly everything in the series was resolved except for what wasn't, the most ominously looming of which being last season's medieval prophecy forecasting the end of the world at the hands of a seriously beautiful woman, and maybe one who's survived the Holocaust, led revolutions in Cuba, and borne witness to Prague Spring.

Having morphed from Romeo Is Bleeding's Mona Demarkov into Sydney Bristow's mother, the practically anagrammatic Irina Derevko, Olin has spent most of the second season behind glass in a high-security CIA bunker that Hannibal Lecter wouldn't rate. Sitting in a yoga position on the bare floor, she's been quietly stealing the series from the superb cast of Garner, Ron Rifkin, anti Victor Garber even when she's not on camera. While Abrams and the Alias writers have done their part to keep us guessing whose side Olin's Irina is really on, none of it would be persuasive if not for the fact that, along with all her other contradictions, Olin has a face that's at once completely open and utterly inscrutable; when she smiles her sly Cheshire-cat smile after some moment of triumph only she understands, you don't know whether to throw yourself at the foot of your TV or run from the house never looking back. You can believe the vast American intelligence agency pitted against her would feel outnumbered; all on her own, she fully justifies the one ongoing mystery of the series that's never seemed even a little contrived. Time and again over the last six months, fans of Alias who were previously unaware of Lena Olin as an actor have asked me, "Who is that woman?" In a way she's built an entire body of work on the question, and it's for her to know and for us to--maybe, someday--find out.