Like her character in the latest Bond film, Olga Kurylenko knows all about dispatching unsuitable men - at the age of 28 she has already seen off two husbands with alarming speed. She tells Nisha Lilia Diu about her action-packed life off-screen, her rise from grinding poverty and the debt she owes her mother
Olga Kurylenko gives me a quick wave as she leaps up the steps into her gleaming white trailer. She clicks the kettle on before returning to the door to beckon me in, looking flushed and fresh from the stunt training she's been doing all morning. We're at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, on the set of the 22nd Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It's reportedly the most violent Bond film to date and, on my long walk through the labyrinthine studio grounds, I have passed the remains of an exploded hotel, a man in a suit sporting a fake bullet hole in his cranium and a fight being filmed on a plane.
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Now, finally, Kurylenko sits in front of me, wearing a very Parisian outfit of white shirt, slim black trousers and black ballet pumps, and with her hair in a high ponytail. The French capital has been the actress's home for 12 years, since she left Ukraine as a 16-year-old modelling hopeful in 1996. 'The agency invites you for a trial,' she explains in a low, languorous, Russian-accented voice, 'and if nobody likes you, you move back. There are a lot of girls who go back.' But Kurylenko stayed and racked up covers for Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire as well as advertising campaigns for Helena Rubinstein and Clarins, before eventually quitting fashion for acting. Quantum of Solace is only her second English-language film (the first was Hitman, based on a computer game) but she is perfect as Camille, a sexy, mysterious Russian-Bolivian agent and, of course, James Bond's love interest.
Quantum of Solace takes up exactly where Casino Royale left off, with Bond intent on avenging the death of his lover Vesper Lynd. Camille, who is also on a revenge mission, is very much a new-generation Bond girl: she, like Halle Berry in Die Another Day or Sophie Marceau in The World Is Not Enough, does less hanging around in a bikini than her forebears and more looking improbably hot while remorselessly dispatching bad guys.
Tall, slim and olive-skinned with mesmerising green eyes and a confident, almost belligerent manner (she raises her voice and slams her fist down on the table when emphasising a point), Kurylenko has something of the man-eater about her. She combines an aggressive independence - 'Thank God I'm single!' she announced recently, 'I hate jealousy, I hate possessiveness. I'm nobody's possession' - with a very sexy public image. She disrobes in Hitman as well as in the French films Le Serpent and The Ring Finger. As a model, she worked on several lingerie campaigns. Is she happy about this? 'Not really, no,' she replies bluntly. 'But, you know, it was paying me money. When you come from Ukraine, and seriously I had no future whatsoever, we didn't have money to pay for big studies. So when they're wanting you to pose in lingerie for €5,000, you know what? I'm f-ing doing it! Because I was starving.'
Kurylenko, 28, grew up in Berdyansk, 'a small town where there is nothing happening', and stayed there until she was spotted, aged 13, on the Moscow subway by a model agent. After some initial reluctance ('A lot of girls, you know, end up not in modelling agencies but somewhere else…'), she began taking the 27-hour train ride into Moscow for assignments. She would spend alternate months in the Russian capital with her mother, Marina, as chaperone, and in her home town. Ukraine had only just declared independence from the USSR and, though her family didn't live in a communal flat, eight of them (uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins) were sharing one apartment in Berdyansk. 'I couldn't have anything, basically,' she says of her childhood. 'I couldn't have any clothes I wanted, shoes, beds, clothes for school - because my mum couldn't buy them.'
