Lena Olin - Biography

Biography

Olin was born the youngest of three children, in Stockholm, Sweden. She is the daughter of actress Britta Holmberg and the director Stig Olin. She studied acting at Sweden's National Academy of Dramatic Art.

She was crowned Miss Scandinavia 1975 in Helsinki, Finland in October 1974.

Olin worked both as a substitute teacher and as a hospital nurse before becoming an actress. Olin performed for over a decade with Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre-ensemble (1980–1994) in classic plays by Shakespeare and Strindberg, and appeared in smaller roles of several Swedish films directed by Bergman and in productions of Swedish Television's TV-Theatre Company.

Ingmar Bergman cast Olin in Face to Face. Later she acted at the national stage in Stockholm in several productions directed by Bergman, and with Bergman's production of King Lear (in which Olin played Cordelia) she toured the world — Paris, Berlin, New York, Copenhagen, Moscow and Oslo, among others. Critically acclaimed stage performances by Olin at Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre included the leading part as The Daughter in A Dream Play by Strindberg, Margarita in the stage adaption of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, Ann in Edward Bond's Summer, Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, the title role in Ingmar Bergman's rendition of Strindberg's Miss Julie and her neurotic Charlotte in the contemporary drama Nattvarden (The Last Supper) by Lars Norén.

In 1980 she was one of the earliest winners of the Ingmar Bergman Prize, initiated in 1978 by the director himself, who was also one of the two judges.

Olin's international debut in a lead role on film was in Bergman's After the Rehearsal (1984). Two years earlier, she had appeared in a small role in the same director's Fanny and Alexander. In 1988, Olin starred with Daniel Day-Lewis in her first major part in an English speaking and internationally produced film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, followed by Sydney Pollack's Havana (1990), Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate (1999) and many others.

In 1989, she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Enemies: A Love Story, in which she portrayed the survivor of a German Nazi camp. In 1994 Olin starred in Romeo Is Bleeding and played what is perhaps her most extreme character to date; the outrageous hit woman Mona Demarkov - still one of the actress's most popular portrayals on film.

Olin and director Lasse Hallström collaborated on the 2000 film Chocolat, which received five Academy Award nominations, and on Casanova (2005). From 2002 to 2006, Olin appeared opposite Jennifer Garner in her first American television role ever; on the second season of the successful television series Alias. For her work on the series as Irina Derevko, Olin received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 2003. Olin received good reviews for her part in Alias — particularly her chemistry with Victor Garber, who played her former husband and sometime-enemy Jack Bristow — and was rumored to have been offered a salary in excess of $100,000 per episode to remain part of the cast. She left the show after her first and only season; this was, however, to spend more time with her family in New York.

In May 2005, Olin returned to Alias for a two-episode appearance at the end of the show's fourth season, and subsequently appeared again in the fifth season, initially in a cameo in December 2005, and then following a four-month hiatus she appeared again in April 2006, and for the finale on 22 May 2006. An upcoming project is supposedly Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (which is to be directed by Hallström). Olin had a small but significant role in 2008's Oscar-nominated film The Reader, playing a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz death march in a trial in the 1960s and the woman's daughter twenty years later.

In 2005 she returned to Sweden for a brief period of filming and starred in a supporting role in Danish director Simon Staho's film Bang Bang Orangutang (with a punk music soundtrack by, among others, The Clash and Iggy Pop).