"I never get comic, charming, lightweight roles," says Lena Olin, being perfectly comic, charming and lightweight during a recent interview. "I tend to get the complicated, dark, dangerous ones."

Mostly, this is true. In Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example, she made bowler hats sexy as Sabina, an artist having an affair with her best friend's husband, a Czech doctor played by Daniel Day-Lewis. "It was a very erotic movie," she says coyly. And in Enemies, a Love Story, set among a community of Polish Holocaust survivors in 1940s New York, she was the free-spirited Masha, who persuades Ron Silver's character to marry her, even though he already has two wives. That performance earned her a best supporting actress nomination at 1990's Academy Awards.

Perhaps then it's not so strange that her career of late is marked by roles that play teasingly against her image as an exotic temptress. She is a vampish double agent in the ABC spy series Alias, and in Hollywood Homicide, opening tomorrow, she plays a radio psychic and adulterous girlfriend of Harrison Ford's rumpled police detective.

"They are such fun, juicy characters," she says, licking her lips.
"Fun and sexy."

In person, as on screen, Olin is a walking superlative. Her greatest charm is that she seems truly charmed by those around her.

She says that unlike other Hollywood studio movies she's made, the experience of making Hollywood Homicide reminded her of her days making films in her native Sweden. "It was like a bunch of friends all working together to try to get it right, and it wasn't about having a thousand assistants to wait on you or the size of your trailer. Of course, I love my air-conditioned trailer and my assistants," she says with a laugh.

When she was 16 and trying to follow in the footsteps of her father, Swedish actor Stig Olin, she received what seemed at the time like discouraging advice from a dear friend of the family. Ingmar Bergman, a director who sadly is better known outside Europe by reputation and for the occasional references by Woody Allen than for his actual films, and who had cast Stig in The Seventh Seal, rebuked young Olin. Lena, he said, you are a beautiful girl, but beauty is not talent. Go to school, study acting, become talented.

"Bergman always believed that the magic happens but you have to know your craft," Olin recalls, some 30 years later and half a world away in some anonymous Beverly Hills hotel suite.

Heeding Bergman's advice, she trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, grounding herself in the works of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Strindberg. She impressed Bergman, not with her beauty this time, but with her craft, and he cast her in the part of an actress in After the Rehearsal, a TV movie that received a theatrical release in North America, then in Fanny and Alexander, in which she played a young man. "Bergman instilled in me such confidence, in a business where confidence is constantly being torn away from you," she says.

Soon, she was being hailed in Sweden as the next Ingrid Bergman, the next Liv Ullman, the next Greta Garbo. And Hollywood beckoned.

"That is the Cinderella dream for many actors, but it was such a culture shock to come here to work," she says. "Acting is so much more serious in Sweden -- remember, Bergman ditched Barbra Streisand [for a role in one of his films] because she was late for a meeting -- so when I got here it was horrifying to see people even yawn on a movie set. Ron Silver yawned once, and I was shocked. It's seen as unprofessional and simply not done. If that would have happened with Bergman, that person would have been so kicked out."

Olin recently visited her husband, director Lasse Hallstrom who directed her in Chocolat, on the set of his latest movie, An Unfinished Life, with Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez. And when one of them yawned (she won't say which one), she still got a "bit of a shiver."

"It's hard to stay true to the craft while working in Hollywood," says Olin, who has found herself working less frequently recently, a combination of choice (she has two children and lives in New York, not Los Angeles) and Hollywood not knowing quite what to do with her.

While her Oscar nomination moved her a few steps up the "actor hierarchy," she has found herself being offered parts in films simply because she brings a certain pedigree to the project. "The thinking is, 'This is very shallow, but if we get Lena Olin it could get a European art-house credibility to it," she says.

In the meantime, she is content to pick and choose her projects. While Alias has been a definite boon -- "it seems people are suddenly reminded that I exist" -- she's not sure if she'll return next season. "There are other things I want to do, other projects," she says simply, as though turning down a hit TV series isn't a big deal. "I don't want to become a commodity. I'm sure that's something Bergman would not approve of."

- NationalPost.com