Lena Maria Jonna Olin is a Swedish actress. She has been nominated for several acting awards, including a Golden Globe for The Unbearable Lightness of Being and an Academy Award for Enemies, A Love Story. Other well-known films in which she has appeared include Chocolat, dir...
Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture, Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, BAFTA Award for Best...
Movies
The Ninth Gate, Chocolat, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Romeo is Bleeding, Awake, Remember Me, Queen of the Damned, Hollywood Homicide, The Hypnotist, Enemies, A Love Story, The Reader, Casanova, Night Falls on Manhattan, Mystery Men, The United States of Leland, Night Train to Lisbon, After th...
TV Shows
Welcome to Sweden, Alias
Star Sign
Aries
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Quote
1
[In response to a question about kissing her co-stars] Kissing someone you don't feel for is unpleasant. Many, however, were very pleasant. Like Johnny Depp. I don't think a lot of women would have a problem kissing him. [Laughs heartily] He's a good friend of ours, by the way. [Lena is married to Lasse Hallstrom, who directed What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Chocolat.] He's not exactly in the Connecticut neighborhood a lot, since he lives in France, but we often see each other at the Oscars and film events.
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[on Johnny Depp] -- Johnny is a very sweet person and fun to be around.
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"What's most interesting and most real to me in my work is to never make the role a complete character, because then you lose a part of the truth. I can't say that this person is just like this or like that. Because you can never do that with real people in real life, so if you try that on stage you lose the truth. Since I myself strive to be able to be a great many things, I also want my character to have that very same liberty. Eventually in that way it will add to a sort of completeness. But it is the story that is told that is the interesting thing and the situations the character is in. And as we humans always are shaped by a special situation or given circumstances, I can never ever say: Thus is my character." (on her acting work, Swedish interview, 1990)
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"I was supposed to play the world's most dangerous woman and do a lot of action scenes. Then you can't come in there like a couch-potato... so I started training at gyms, weight-lifting and all things possible, and then I've just continued with that a couple of times a week." (on how she manages to keep so fit when playing her "Alias" success-character Irina Derevko)
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"I am in love with my best friend" (On husband Lasse Hallström).
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"There are no patterns that lasts a lifetime. Some people can't stand the floating boarders. They decide on one life philosophy and live thereafter. But I've decided not to decide. I don't know everything. I don't understand everything. Both my own and others reactions are often a mystery to me. I let it be that way, hoping that maybe, instead, I can learn to understand the pattern of no patterns." (on life, people and relationships)
7
"I want to show that from the negative, when you dare to see it, the positive is born, because there is the root to the good. I have inside myself, for example, a sharp aggression. But if you remove it, I lose my creativity. I have a great insecurity, but if you remove it, I also lose my sensitivity. Good theater is the theater that can make it a little attractive, a bit cool, to have these dark inner depths. You must be a bit afraid of them. I have a big need of spending time being alone, just to fear these dark sides. We must have secrets. That's why I almost never agree, or rarely, to really personal interviews: you must have large pools, untouched inside yourself." (on acting, theater and her interest in playing dark women roles on stage and in films)
Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1988.
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Lena studied the course of Classic Humanities with Latin as her major language in the Swedish equivalent to senior high school/upper secondary education (1971-1974). Later she also extended her course for half a year with the subjects of Maths, Physics and Chemistry as it was necessary for her medicine studies at university.
7
Was a top student. Graduated with 4,9 average in her graduation scores (the highest in Sweden at that point was 5.0). After failing twice in the test for drama school, she began to study medicine at university to become a doctor. However, she was convinced by Ingmar Bergman (who had directed her father in several films and watched Lena play amateur theater) to try a third time. She did and was admitted (and gave up medicine).
8
Lena has said in a Swedish interview that contact with others got her to act, even very early as a child, describing it as "an uncontrolled need of contact" and to "invent things": She remembers when she was seven and in love with a boy and staged an argument with him and then acted out a faked concussion. She got carried home as he apparently believed her: It ended with him coming home to her with apples and Andy Pandy books.
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Before becoming an actress Lena worked both as a sub teacher (in languages) and as a hospital nurse (she first studied medicine at university) back in Sweden.
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Failed twice - both times in the very last test - two years in a row before she was accepted the third time at Sweden's prestigious National Theatre Academy (Teaterhögskolan) in 1976.
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Moved permanently to the US in 1995 together with husband Lasse Hallström (as both their international careers developed separately) and the couple have since then been resident in Bedford, New York. However, they still have their summer house in Sweden (located in the Swedish province of Skåne) where the family spend their summer holidays as well as an apartment in Stockholm.
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Has a fine singing voice. Recorded, a.o., Swedish song "Människors glädje" (written and composed by her father Stig Olin) and Swedish country/folk tune "Sommarbrevet (Jag skrev ett brev)" in the 1970s (Polar Music, Sweden).
Considered for the role of Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992).
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Member of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre (1980-1994).
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National Theatre Academy; Stockholm, Sweden (1976-1979).
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Stated in a May 2005 interview with "TV Guide" that, along with her appearances in the final two episodes of Season 4 of Alias (2001), she is open to appearing in Season 5 as well.
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For the role of Masha in Enemies: A Love Story (1989), she received the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination.
$5 Million
