Actress Lena Olin Uses Her Body and Makes No Bones About It

NEW YORK —  Lena Olin undergoes a sudden transformation when she is in the camera’s eye. After a relaxed chat on a sofa at the Ritz, 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 smoldering intensity, her smile teases with a hint of naughtiness. The woman exudes sexuality.

It isn’t hard to understand why the local tabloids are calling her the “Swedish bombshell.” Minutes into her new film, “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 Czechoslovak 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. “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. The New York Film Critics voted her Best Supporting Actress last weekend 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 has started filming Sydney Pollack’s “Havana,” in which she stars as the adulterous lover of a Cuban revolutionary played by Robert Redford.

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,” she says calmly. “But I’m very happy if I can express something in my work that people like.” In fact, Olin says she will gladly pass up six-figure movie offers, “if nothing irresistible turns up,” to return to the national theater in Stockholm, where she takes the subway to work.

“It’s important not to lay in a bubble bath drinking champagne,” Olin says. “It’s important to take part in what life’s all about.”