From Ukraine With Love

LONDON, England -- For most actresses, being cast as a Bond girl has one obvious highlight - the chance to film a love scene with Daniel Craig.

Olga Kurylenko at the premiere of the new James Bond film 'Quantum of Solace'.
But Olga Kurylenko, the Ukrainian beauty who plays Bond's love interest in Quantum Of Solace, is not most actresses. For her, there are greater perks to the role than sleeping with 007.

Unlike some previous incarnations of the Bond girl, Kurylenko's character is no purring, preening sex bomb content to be bedded then chucked by the debonair British spy.

She is tough and driven and what's more, Bond never seduces her. Instead - and Bond purists should look away now - he actually empathises with her.

"I really did get lucky that I did the Bond movie in 2008 when the woman got more interesting and more independent and had much more to her," Kurylenko, a former model, says.

"The part has much more than just beauty. The beauty is just a fact, something aside, but there is much more to this character, luckily."

There is plenty of substance to Kurylenko, too. At 28, she has rejected as unsuitable more roles than many actresses see in a lifetime.

She has two divorces behind her, she performs her own stunts on the Bond movie and, although she has graced the covers of Elle, Vogue and marie claire, she bristles at any mention of her incredible beauty.

"Nobody likes to be judged on their looks," she says, fixing me earnestly with her startling grey-green eyes.

"Maybe someone does but not me. It's just very sad but not for me, because I'm fine. I know who I am."

Kurylenko's character in the new film mirrors the actress's own crisp independence.

She plays Camille, a feisty Bolivian on a revenge mission, a woman unafraid to use her sex appeal to manipulate the men she needs to achieve her goal. She matches Bond in the action stakes, particularly during one high-speed motorboat chase set in Haiti.

Inspired by Craig's determination to do all his own stunts, Kurylenko overcame her initial fears to become something of an action heroine herself.

"It's like I learned a new profession," she says of her experience with the stunt work.

"It was six months of intense training.

"It makes me think I can work on anything, you know?"

Kurylenko's singular determination makes sense when you consider her upbringing.

Born into a poor family in Soviet-era Ukraine, she is about as far away from a pampered Hollywood princess as possible.

Her father left the family when she was a baby so it fell to her art teacher mother to raise her, aided by a close-knit extended family of grandmother, uncles, aunt and cousins, all of whom lived in the same flat in the small town of Berdyansk.

Money was tight in her family but love was bountiful, the actress says.

Although there were no non-Soviet films screened in her local cinema and no town theatre, Kurylenko saw some children rehearsing a play at school and asked whether she could join in.

"It was the Soviet Union and all the foreign films didn't get to us," she says.

"It was such a different type of life. It's such a pity, because they don't have access to any culture. I didn't either, because there was nothing at all, nothing, because it was so small."

Nonetheless, Kurylenko fed her soul with her acting, which she teamed with ballet classes. Then at 13, on a trip to Moscow with her mother, she was spotted by a modelling scout.

After three years modelling in Russia, her mum allowed her to travel to Paris for a "meet and greet" with a French modelling agency, for which the young Ukrainian wore a garish shirt emblazoned with bright-yellow flowers.

The black-clad fashion pack were aghast but she was nonetheless signed by the agency and her fashion sense has clearly evolved.

Today she is flawlessly elegant in a khaki military-style blouse in chiffon tucked into high-waisted tailored black trousers and teamed with simple flats.

Her hair is loosely bundled up and she wears no jewellery but a pair of diamond stud earrings and a diamond ring - on her middle finger.

In Paris, Kurylenko soon found success as an international model, an unsurprising development given her exotic looks - all high cheekbones, huge eyes and sensuous lips.

But she missed her acting, so - after mastering French - she decided to enrol in drama classes.

"Then one day I thought: 'Rather than just doing it as a hobby, why don't I go for some auditions?"' she says.

The offers came flooding in immediately but they were for the wrong type of roles.

"I realised very quickly that very often I was getting cast as a model, or parts where I just had to be a shadow of a guy or like a cliche, and I said no," she says shyly.

"Coming from modelling, the first impression, the first thing people will see me in is going to stay.

"So I knew I had to start with something serious. So I just waited for the project."

That project was l'Annulaire (The Ring Finger), an arthouse French film based on a Japanese book.

"Nothing explodes and there are no special effects," Kurylenko says, describing it with evident pride. "It's a little, weird artsy film but beautiful, interesting."

The leap from French indie flick to starring in the second-most lucrative film franchise of all time (after Star Wars) is a fairly big one. Along the way there were two husbands: photographer Cedric Van Mol, to whom she is still close, followed by US entrepreneur Damian Gabrielle. She clearly doesn't miss being married. "Thank God I'm single!" she said recently. "I hate jealousy, I hate possessiveness. I'm nobody's possession."

In 2007, she starred in the Hollywood-produced comic-book adaptation Hitman and in 2006 she was in Paris je t'aime with Elijah Wood but both are tiny films compared with the Bond juggernaut.

"For Bond, there was definitely no hesitation because it's just Bond," Kurylenko says of being offered the part of Camille.

"It's such a big long legacy and the film has existed for decades and it's so important. "People really love it around the world."

Already Kurylenko is feeling the effects Quantum Of Solace has had on her profile - both good and bad.

Although l'Annulaire was not released outside France, the British tabloids last week published stills of sensational erotic scenes from the movie. Headlines called it a "sex film" and drew attention to the actress's nudity.

On the other hand, Kurylenko's phone is ringing a lot more and she hopes that after the release of Quantum she will be offered a raft of interesting parts.

Ideally, she would like to have the sort of cross-over career that actresses such as Juliette Binoche or Judi Dench (who reprises her role as M in Quantum) have enjoyed.

She wants to do both interesting Hollywood films and small European ones.

"You realise at some point: 'Okay, I am acting in France' but if you want to make it bigger you have to do an international film and American films are international."

Next she will appear in a small Israeli film, Kirot, about a friendship between two women, and after that she's not sure. As with her career path so far, it seems certain Kurylenko will consider her next move extremely carefully.

"The most important thing is to make the right choice," she says sagely.

Quantum Of Solace opens on November 19.

Source: The Sun-Herald