in Awake, Casanova, Alias: Season 5

Lena Maria Jonna Olin, born March 22nd 1955 in Stockholm, Stockholms län, Sweden. Lena Olin had a successful career as an actress before coming to Hollywood. She had acted at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm, having been directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Her father, Stig Olin, also an actor, had appeared in six Bergman films. As a young actress, she acted in plays by Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Lena made her international movie debut in After the Rehearsal (1984-TV) directed by Bergman.

She became well-known after co-starring, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, in the 1988 Philip Kaufman film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the adaptation of the Milan Kundera novel. After coming to the US, she mostly played distinguished, exotic temptresses, intelligent women and crude vamps. Bergman had developed Lena's artistic gift to play different human emotions and express them in a subtle way.

Her first American film was Enemies a Love Story (1989), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Director Sidney Pollack re-wrote the screenplay for Havana (1990) especially for her; she starred alongside Robert Redford. In 1993, she co-starred with Gary Oldman, in Romeo is Bleeding, in which she played a psychotic Russian hitwoman.

She was nominated for an MTV award for Best Action Scene in which her character is handcuffed in the back of a police car and attempts to escape. In 1999, she co-starred in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, with Johnny Depp. In 2000 she co-starred in Chocolat, which was directed by her husband Lasse Hallestrom.

Chocolat received a Best Picture Oscar nomination. In 2002 she moved to the small screen and appeared in Season 2 of Alias as the duplicitous, "Irina Derevko", the long thought dead mother of Jennifer Garner's "Sydney Bristow". Lena received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

She left after 1 season to spend more time with her family, but did return for 2 episodes in Season 4, and 3 in Season 5. In 2005, Lena co-starred with Heath Ledger in Casanova, directed by husband Lasse Hallestrom. In 2008, she appeared in The Reader, which was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.

In 2007, she played Hayden Christensen's mother in the thriller Awake. And in 2010, she played Robert Pattinson's mother in Remember Me.

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