High Tide for Karina Lombard : Moving From ‘Sargasso Sea’ to Tom Cruise and ‘The Firm’

Karina Lombard’s story is about discovery.

First, there was her discovery by fashion photographer Bruce Weber. Lombard, then a teen-ager, was on a low-budget visit to New York with a friend. Tired of eating bread and potatoes, the two scrounged up all the money they could to go out for one decent meal. At the restaurant, Weber spotted Lombard.

What followed was a successful modeling career: advertisements, fashion layouts and magazine covers--including the French magazine 20ans, which launched another discovery. The magazine cover was enlarged into a poster in Paris and spotted by a French director-producer who asked her to take her first screen test.

After acting in the French-Canadian telefilm “L’Isle” (“The Island”), Lombard went back to New York to study Method acting, which she found to be a unique journey of self-discovery.

“It was amazing, because it was like a therapy,” she says, noting she had plenty of experiences to draw on. She was born in Tahiti, the youngest of five children of a Lakota Indian mother and Swiss-Russian father. After her parents separated while she was an infant, she traveled from Spain to Switzerland, where she was raised by nannies and tutors.

“We were educated by so many different people, so many different mentalities, so many languages. . . . When I started to study (Method acting), instead of (my childhood) being this horrible thing, it was amazing. It was a gift. It was this big treasure I could dip into. . . . There are so many characters I can play because of that.”

The most recent character she’s dipped into is Antoinette, a Creole heiress who marries an Englishman in “Wide Sargasso Sea.” The film is an adaptation of Jean Rhys’ final novel: the tale of the first, mad Mrs. Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.”

One result of Lombard’s scattered upbringing is that she speaks Spanish, French, German and English. Her accent reflects this mix of cultures, somehow distinctly European, but impossible to pin down geographically.

Her looks are even more exotic, bringing to mind what Rex Reed once said about Sophia Loren: “All the natural mistakes of beauty fall together in her to create a magnificent accident.”

This unique allure landed her the pivotal role of “the girl on the beach” in “The Firm,” due this summer. Her character has been drastically changed from John Grisham’s novel, she says, to give her more suspense and mystery.

“My goal was to make her likable and give her justification for (her actions). So that’s how I auditioned for it and that’s what (director) Sydney (Pollack) liked. I was only auditioned once. Normally you get called back and called back,” she says.

But filming “The Firm” presented its own problems. Lombard went from being the star of a low-budget independent film to being a player in a big-budget movie with its own high-profile star, Tom Cruise. She arrived in the middle of the production and was thrown into what she called “hot and intense” love scenes, which was awkward.

“It’s like, ‘Uh, what’s your name again? Have we been properly introduced?’ ” she says, laughing. “It was very awkward and demanded on my part a lot of concentration because there were a lot of people there.”

Lombard is skittish about discussing future projects. “Maybe it’s the old American Indian thing that says you shouldn’t speak of things you’re going to do, you should only speak of things you have done,” she says.

But she admits she’s hunting for good movie roles: ones that aren’t exploitative, ones that don’t insult audiences, ones that her hero Ingrid Bergman would have played.

“I feel like a vampire--a vampire waiting to feed. And I’d rather wait for good, healthy blood than rotten blood, you know what I mean? That’s really important,” she says, talking with her hands, realizing she’s getting carried away with her simile, “because if you keep sucking on that rotten blood, then you’re going to become rotten! And you’re going to look rotten! And that spark in your eyes will be gone!”