NEW YORK
Lena Olin undergoes a sudden transformation when she is in the camera's eye. After a relaxed chat on a sofa, the 34-year-old actress stretches out her supple body and runs a hand through her thick brown hair as a photographer clicks away. Her milk-chocolate eyes deepen with a look of smouldering intensity, her smile teases with a hint of naughtiness. She exudes sexuality.

It isn't hard to understand why tabloids are calling her the Swedish Bombshell. Minutes into Enemies, A Love Story, the voluptuous Olin pulls up her print dress and tears off Ron Silver's suspenders for a frenzied session of lovemaking.

This follows her sensuous performance in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being as a Czechoslovakian surgeon's mistress who generally appears in nothing more than a bowler hat and black lingerie, and sometimes less than that.

"With a camera, with the people I work with, all the inhibitions just are gone," Olin says in a husky voice made deeper by cigarettes. "This work is so necessary for me, and that's why I need it so much, and that's why I love it so much.

"I use myself for each part. Naturally, it's my body, it's my soul, it's my feelings. That's the only way I know how to work. I couldn't pretend."

Olin appears but a nanosecond away from Hollywood stardom. She is nominated for a best-supporting actress Oscar and she received the equivalent award from the New York film critics for her portrayal of Silver's tormented mistress in Enemies, a complex tale of passion and pain among Holocaust survivors in postwar New York.

As if that weren't enough, Olin is now filming Havana, in which she stars as the adulterous lover of a Cuban revolutionary played by Robert Redford.

All this might seem a fantasy come true for the daughter of a Stockholm theatrical family, who grew up "almost pathologically shy" and was rejected by Sweden's national theatre at 19.

In Paul Mazursky's Enemies, based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Olin plays Masha, a concentration camp survivor who lives with her ailing mother in a shabby Bronx apartment periodically rattled by the elevated train outside. As the mistress of Herman Broder (Ron Silver), a rabbi's ghostwriter who shuttles among lovers in three boroughs, the Swede manages to convey the accent and affect of a Polish Jew in 1949.

Even with her hair, tinted red for the film, pulled back in a bun, Olin combines erotic intensity with inner rage as Masha struggles against her demons and deceitfully schemes to win Silver's affections. Olin spent hours with a dialogue coach to give a Yiddish inflection to her English, which she speaks almost flawlessly. She lost weight so her ample proportions would not detract from the role. Most importantly, she interviewed several Holocaust survivors and was struck by their stubborn optimism.

"She wants to live so much," Olin says of Masha. "She wants to feel joy. She wants to feel love. But I'm not sure she's capable of feeling really what we call love any more.

"Lovemaking is a way for her to get away, to escape. She's so haunted by the memories, by the humiliation."

Recalling her role in Unbearable Lightness as Sabina, the Czechoslovakian painter who likes to do it with mirrors and take pictures of other naked women, Olin marvels at "her joie de vivre, her way of being free with her own sexuality. That's something I had to do, I had to feel that joy, I had to feel that joy within my own body.

"I would love to be free in my personal life. I would like to get close to other people." Instead, Olin says she is "very tormented," which she sees as part of the human condition.

"I think a lot of people suffer from not being able to get close to other people. When you're working, when you're in the character, you don't have to deal with those things. You can do anything! Your first instinct is always the right one."

She grew up in the theatre. Her mother was a stage actress who retired to raise three children, while her father, Stig, was in some of Ingmar Bergman's earliest films. Olin's parents split up when she was 16.

She met Bergman when she was 19 and trying to get into Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre, which takes only a dozen applicants a year. She flunked the audition, but the Swedish director cast her as an extra in the movie Face To Face, starring Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. A year later, Olin was accepted by the national theatre and Bergman wrote a lead role for her in a TV film, After The Rehearsal.

But her relationship with Bergman later soured because of what seemed like a grade-Z movie plot. In 1985, after years of doing Shakespeare and Chekhov in Stockholm, Olin agreed to star in Bergman's stage production of A Dream Play, the very same Strindberg work that she was pretending to rehearse in the TV film. Olin was living with Swedish actor Orjan Ramburg at the time, and, like her earlier fictional counterpart, she got pregnant during rehearsals.

"I couldn't believe it," Olin says. "It was so magic." But Bergman, she says, "was furious. He put up this play because he wanted me to do it and I let him down. I said, 'You'll have to close the show or get someone else because I'm going to keep this baby.' He made me go through with it. I played until the ninth month of pregnancy, which was very hard, I tell you."

Olin professes an utter lack of concern over whether she might be typecast as a bubble-headed Hollywood sexpot. "The person Lena Olin is not so important to me. But I'm very happy if I can express something in my work that people like."

Many thanks to Jinnie for this article!