Saffron Burrows: In ‘The Bank Job,’ based on a true story, the former model portrays ‘a woman at a cliff’s edge,’ quietly leading her gang in an elaborate heist.

AS the street-wise ex-model Martine Love in “The Bank Job,” Saffron Burrows and her cheekbones bewitch a ramshackle trio from her old neighborhood into pulling off a seemingly impossible bank heist, tunneling under centuries-old buildings to steal millions in cash and jewels from safe deposit boxes of London’s Lloyds Bank.

Things go horribly wrong -- costar Jason Statham’s famously furrowed brow earns yet another wrinkle -- and suddenly everyone’s fate turns on the whims of a desperate pornographer, a shifty MI5 agent, a Black Power leader and a cross-dressing British lord.

And, yes, it’s all based on the true events of September 1971.

“The Bank Job,” which opens Friday, follows Love as she convinces Terry, a struggling car salesman with a wife and kids, played by the terminally unshaven Statham, and his bumbling old school chums (Daniel Mays and Stephen Campbell Moore) to pull off the scheme.

She tells no one that she’s working off a debt to an MI5 agent who needs her to secure photos of the bon vivant Princess Margaret in flagrante delicto with a Caribbean couple from one of those safe deposit boxes.

For Burrows, 35, herself an ex-model raised by ‘70s Socialist activists, the script traced a pivotal moment in England’s history when the nation’s rigid class system was breaking apart. The fact that the British government’s gag order kept this story from the public for 30 years just underscores the magnitude of that shift, she added.

“It was the undoing of what was traditional British society and the making of a new England,” she said, calling from a press tour in New York. “The classes began to mix in a new way. You feel these worlds spiraling toward each other.”

Burrows described her character as “a woman at a cliff’s edge. Amid all these male voices is this female one who is clearly giving orders, who is very much at the helm.”

Much of her character, though, is revealed with sparse dialogue, knowing silences and simmering glances.

“She actually speaks very little unless she’s giving instruction. . . . She gives away very little verbally, but each sentence is totally loaded. She says something about ‘wishing to cease to exist.’ And ‘beginning again.’ That speaks volumes for her.”

As with the other characters’ names in the film, Martine Love is fictional. Indeed, Burrows said, there was little detail available about this group.

“One article in London had a photo of the people who were convicted or suspected,” she said. “We believe some were convicted and some got away. Because of the gag order it’s been very hard to unearth the truth. In a way, I just conjured her alongside the costume designer and hair and makeup artists.”

Some of the history, though, came from an actual member of the original team of robbers. He and Statham worked closely together, Burrows said. But that man’s identity, naturally, must be kept secret.

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gina.piccalo@latimes.com

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Where you’ve seen her

Saffron Burrows studied improv as an adolescent, and at 15 she was discovered by a modeling scout. Director Jim Sheridan cast her in a small role in the 1993 Daniel Day-Lewis film “In the Name of the Father,” and two years later she appeared opposite Chris O’Donnell and Minnie Driver in “Circle of Friends,” as a 1950s Irish girl. She starred in this year’s Sundance Film Festival feature “The Guitar,” directed by Robert Redford’s daughter Amy Redford, and she’s enjoyed a recurring role on ABC’s Emmy-winning series “Boston Legal” as sexy litigator Lorraine Weller.