Julia Ormond is used to being a focus of male fantasies. 

Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt and Aidan Quinn obsessed over
her beauty in Legends of the Fall (1994). Richard Gere and 
Sean Connery fought over her Guinevere in First Knight (1995). Greg Kinnear and Harrison Ford battled to win her hand in the remake of Sabrina (1995). 

For the most part, the bright, articulate, well-schooled Ormond,
32, hasn't been much more onscreen than a very pretty face. 

Well, no more Miss Pretty Girl. 

In Smilla's Sense of Snow, adapted from the international best-selling novel by Peter Hoeg, Ormond is on her own, 
a strong-willed heroine who battles and triumphs sans
her usual cast of moony-eyed males. 

"It's very hard," she admits, "to find a balanced female role that
is allowed to be tough and aggressive who isn't the demon 
woman of the film."

Ormond's character is the intelligent, intuitive scientist Smilla Jasperson. Half Inuit, half American, she left Greenland as a 
child and grew up in Copenhagen. But she can still read the
snow like a book, hates the noisy crowds of the city and 
longs for her icy, quiet, wide-open homeland. 

The reclusive woman has built igloos around her heart. When the only person who melted her frozen feelings, a young Inuit boy, 
dies after falling off their shared apartment building, she is 
obsessed with finding who killed him and why - think Nancy 
Drew of the North. The complex journey leads her back to Greenland, where she solves the boy's mystery and 
confronts her own ghosts. 

The role's physicality was slightly more than Ormond
was used to. Co-star Richard Harris calls it 
"a role that would kill most men." 

"Some critics have described her as a sort of female
Schwarzenegger, but that's not how I see her. She's 
just tough enough to exert herself when she's in 
dire straits," she says. 

Ormond prepared for the role by doing 2 1/2 hours a day, six 
days a week of running, aerobics, circuit training and weights 
with the trainer who whipped Daniel Day-Lewis into 
hunk shape for Last of the Mohicans. 

Ormond chuckles as she recalls: "He had me kick boxing and I 
kept saying, 'I don't much like the kick boxing. Can't we do 
yoga instead?' " 

But the exercise helped her withstand the below-freezing temperatures in Greenland during the four month shoot. 

"I have a terrible time with the cold; I have bad circulation and
I completely freeze, and my thought processes slow down. 
I didn't want that to happen." 

Another preparation was chopping Ormond's long, thick hair 
into an Inuitesque bob. "That was risky because I've got quite curly hair. There were a couple of times when it wasn't so great, but 
good old Kiehl's Silk Groom (hair cream) came in handy." 

The Inuit accent was a little more difficult than the 'do. A
dialogue coach taught her tongue placement and how to use 
different mouth muscles for Greenlandic words. 

"The climate and the environment strongly influence a dialect," Ormond explains. "If you're brought up in a city, you will speak 
very quickly, with the energy of the city. If you are in a vast, open space like Texas, your accent will have an open, spread sound.
In Greenland, the accent comes from the way they have to
breathe to survive in that environment. The cold actually
widens the soft palate." 

Ormond's environment is England. Although she currently resides 
in New York, she was born in Epsom, the second oldest in a
family of three brothers and one sister. Her father is an engineer/stockbroker turned computer software designer. 
Her mother is a former chemist. 

Ormond had originally planned to become a painter, but then a teacher suggested acting. She enrolled in London's Webber 
Douglas Academy and quickly landed roles on the British stage
(The Rehearsal, Wuthering Heights, The Crucible and Faith, 
Hope and Charity, for which she won the '89 London
Drama Critics best newcomer award). 

Ormond's U.S. breakthrough was on TNT's Young Catherine. She played Stalin's wife opposite Robert Duvall in HBO's Stalin and
that brought her to the attention of Ed Zwick, who cast her 
in Legends. 

The resulting press attention was not something Ormond was, 
or is, comfortable with. She recounts, with an embarrassed smile:
"I did a couple of interviews recently very hungover and then got transcripts back and everybody was just, 'Julia, you are never 
doing an interview again hungover, because this is bad.' 
But you live and learn." 

It isn't that she has anything to hide. "I have great admiration for people who have the ability to sit there and open their hearts,
their past, all the rest of it. I've changed a lot over the last 
30 years, so why say something now that's going to be
with me for the next 20 years?" 

"Besides, the more you talk about it (your private feelings), the 
more you limit yourself." 

Ormond refuses to be limited, personally or professionally. She's now heading up a production with Fox Searchlight, a documentary titled Calling the Ghosts (running through March on Cinemax) 
about two Bosnian women who were raped and tortured in the Serbian camps. "It's about their journey from maintaining 
dignity through silence in the camps to realizing that if they 
upheld that outside the camps, they would be perpetuating 
ethnic cleansing."