Back In From the Cold

She sprang from obscurity like a rocket a couple of years back, snagged the lead female role in three high-profile Hollywood movies--then seemed to drop out of sight as fast as she had emerged. No sooner had people stopped asking “Julia Who?” than they began to ponder: “Whatever happened to Julia Ormond?”

The answer? The British actress has spent much of last year working in Europe on a film that triumphantly ushers in Phase 2 of her film career. She is the title character in “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” a thriller-murder mystery that is based on the international bestseller by Danish novelist Peter Hoeg and opens Friday.

The film is set in Denmark and in Greenland’s icy wastes. Ormond plays the dour, emotionally closed Smilla, a Greenlandic woman living in Copenhagen, the Danish capital, who turns detective when a young boy living in her apartment block meets a puzzling death.

Ormond is in classy company. The film was directed by Bille August, himself Danish, whose previous credits include “Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the 1988 Oscar for best foreign-language film, and “The Best Intentions,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1992. Distinguished actors including Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris, Gabriel Byrne and Jim Broadbent are in the supporting cast. (Rumors have linked Byrne and Ormond romantically since the filming, but they have denied them.)

Yet “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” is unquestionably Ormond’s film. Not only is she the leading character, but she is present in almost every frame--a female hero whose actions advance the plot. Whatever critics think of “Smilla,” the film announces Ormond’s arrival as a major actress, likely to be a significant player for years to come.

With “Smilla,” she earned that status the hard way. In Greenland she sailed around icebergs, went dog-sledding, saw fish being skinned in markets and learned to run across ice floes like a native Greenlander, without looking down. She was also called on to abseil 60 feet above the freezing ocean from a ship. And she filmed several scenes on the ice at 20 degrees below, snow stinging her face as if she were in a sandstorm.

“I loved the fact that Smilla was her own woman, very uncompromising, with a terrific intellect,” she says. “I also thought Greenland was a fantastically unusual world we’re not used to seeing on screen, and visually that could be exciting.” Another aspect of the script (by Ann Biderman, best known for the TV cop series “NYPD Blue”) appealed to Ormond--the way Greenlanders have historically been treated by the Danes, who colonized the snowy region for centuries.

“ ‘Smilla’ may not be commercial,” Ormond says, “but I thought it was a terrific project. Hollywood offers a few interesting roles, but I don’t think I’m on the A-list, and I don’t see the best scripts. So I’m lucky I was offered ‘Smilla.’ ”

Emotionally, she found it a tough role to play: “It was an isolating experience. Bille didn’t like it when I smiled on screen, and I agreed with him--Smilla’s more inscrutable than that. But it makes you depressed. I had to shut down something inside me to play her that way.”

She pondered this in a hotel suite in this German city, where post-production for “Smilla” was being completed. Ormond, 32, whose alert, intelligent features and to-die-for bone structure make her even more striking in the flesh than on celluloid, was a picture of understated elegance in a simple black tuxedo-style suit and black suede boots. On completing her duties in Munich, she would head for Moscow, to make a film called “The Barber of Siberia” with Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov (“Burnt by the Sun”).

This gives an indication of the career path Ormond would like to follow--a deliberate mix of European and American films, small independent movies and bigger-budget studio projects. Positioning herself in this way is shrewd, since most challenging roles for actresses these days are to be found in the independent sector and in European films, as the recent Oscar nominations for actresses proved.

Moving into another career phase may also halt gossipy talk of Ormond’s initial rise to fame. She first emerged as love interest to three brothers (played by Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn and Henry Thomas) in 1994’s “Legends of the Fall,” then was cast as Guinevere opposite Richard Gere in 1995’s “First Knight,” a retelling of the Arthurian legend. Swiftly she segued to Sydney Pollack’s “Sabrina” in late 1995, portraying the title role made famous by Audrey Hepburn in Billy Wilder’s original film.

The three films certainly raised her profile dramatically. Yet “First Knight” received a lukewarm reception from audiences and critics alike. “Legends of the Fall” was successful but is now regarded mainly as Pitt’s breakthrough film. And “Sabrina” had a rough ride from reviewers, most of whom also thought Ormond was no Hepburn.

Yet Ormond is happy to defend the films.

“They opened a door for me in Europe and in the States,” she says. “I recognize I wouldn’t have been offered ‘Smilla’ had I not done the American movies.”

She is especially protective about “Sabrina”: “I think we all underestimated the extent to which it would come under flak for being a remake. I’d only seen Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’ and ‘My Fair Lady,’ so it didn’t dawn on me it would be a problem.”

Coincident with Ormond’s rise was a long, critical piece about her in the New York Times Magazine in 1995 called “The Conception, Production and Distribution of Julia Ormond.” It detailed how she had switched agents and publicists, conveying an impression that she was no innocent in her rise to fame but had somehow orchestrated it through manipulation.

Ormond sighs when the article is mentioned, saying: “Do people think this is a profession in which you can be that calculating?” She insists she has no idea why she was plucked from obscurity: “I have memories I hold on to of colleagues at drama school, and I have no idea why it’s happened for me and not them. And they don’t know either.”

She has had two years to get used to the idea of success, but it hasn’t quite happened yet--perhaps because of the speed at which it occurred. Only in her first year at art school did she decide to take drama seriously, enrolling at London’s Webber-Douglas Academy. She graduated in 1988 and the next year was named best newcomer by London drama critics for her work in Christopher Hampton’s “Faith, Hope and Charity.” She had met her husband-to-be, Rory Edwards, who played Heathcliff to her Catherine onstage in “Wuthering Heights.” She seemed to be on a roll, as a heroin addict in the British TV series “Traffik,” then as Catherine the Great and Stalin’s wife, Nadya, in two movies for American TV.

Yet her English films were not successful, and only four years ago Ormond was at an ebb. She was a struggling, almost unknown actress with a failed marriage, living alone in a flat in Hackney, an unfashionable part of east London.

“I had a period of horrendous debt and was depressed about not being able to envisage paying it off,” she recalls. “I’d been in a marriage and been spat out of that. I reached a point where I was unable to get out of bed in the morning. I just couldn’t face it.”

She looks back on that period now with a shudder, agreeing that her fortunes have changed by 180 degrees.

“Funny thing was I was told it would happen by two psychics, who both pinpointed the exact week,” she says. “The last week in March, it turned around.” She secured a role in a European film, “Nostradamus,” as the prophet’s first wife; the film bombed, but it was badly needed income. While making “Nostradamus” she learned she had landed “Legends of the Fall”; director Ed Zwick had seen her in “Traffik” and as Nadya in HBO’s “Stalin.”

“She did a screen test with Brad Pitt in a New York loft one Sunday,” Zwick has recalled. “And she was perfect.” The actors in “Legends of the Fall”--Pitt, Quinn and Anthony Hopkins--were costly, so Ormond’s arrival was a gift to the studio, TriStar.

“One reason they used her,” Zwick said, “is she didn’t cost much money.” Still, landing “Legends of the Fall” finally ended Ormond’s depression; Zwick remembered her constantly singing Broadway show tunes on set.

One vestige of her past is that she has still not moved out of her flat in Hackney.

“It’s just been work, work, work,” she says with a sigh. “Twice I’ve found a flat I’ve liked, gone the distance of buying it, and it’s fallen through. I’d mentally and emotionally moved in, which is stressful to go through. So I’ve stayed in Hackney.” But now, she insists, she is on the move--to a home in London’s chic Covent Garden district.

Yet she sounds tentative, which makes one wonder if Ormond believes she has really arrived at her current preeminence. Bille August, for his part, has no doubt.

“Julia is bankable,” he says simply. “This film was budgeted at $20 million, and at that price you can’t cast a Danish actress. If we’d cast an unknown, the film wouldn’t have been made.

“I needed someone we could make believable but also someone with Smilla’s clarity. She’s a very strong, fearless character, sometimes unlovable yet brave. I didn’t like ‘Sabrina’ at all, but in ‘Legends of the Fall,’ there’s a scene where Julia kisses Brad Pitt, a forbidden kiss. And I thought, ‘If she can do that with such pain and clarity, she’s what I want.’ ”

Ormond knows what she wants too. She has formed a production company called Indican (a play on “in the can”), which has a deal with Fox Searchlight; through it she aims to find scripts she can produce and direct and others she can star in. She is now trying to line up distributors for “Calling the Ghosts,” an Indican-produced documentary about two women who survived the horrors of Serbian prison camps.

“There’s three people and me,” she says of her production company. “I spent a lot of time choosing them. I wanted smart, intelligent people with a sense of what’s edgy.” Not unlike Julia Ormond herself.