Alice Krige

A strikingly lovely brunette actress, Krige was born in South Africa and completed a degree in psychology and drama before moving to the UK at age 22 to study acting further and pursue her career. Her delicate, high-cheekboned beauty, poise and crisp speaking voice have made her ideal for period drama, and she made a vivid impression as a woman who becomes involved with a runner in the 1924 Olympics in her first film, "Chariots of Fire" (1981).

She was also lovely as the demure Lucie Manette in her US TV-movie debut, an adaptation of "A Tale of Two Cities" (1980). Krige, though, has also been called upon to convey a seductive, sometimes feline aloofness, as in "Ghost Story" (1981), in which she adeptly combined a sense of nostalgia and danger as the woman who haunts four elderly ex-beaus.

Krige was not able to immediately follow up the one-two punch of her first features, though. A restless talent who has often sought out offbeat roles in small-scale or independent productions, she also plunged into TV-movies and miniseries that struck her fancy, and worked for a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984-85.

Her return to features came with the unpopular Biblical epic, "King David" (1985), in which her Bathsheba tempted Richard Gere in the title role. Krige has subsequently alternated leads and second leads in films like "Barfly" (1987), as an upscale publisher intrigued by low-life Mickey Rourke and his writings; "Haunted Summer" (1988), an uneven but lovingly filmed fictional encounter between Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and her Mary Godwin, during the season in which she conceives the idea for her novel "Frankenstein"; and "See You in the Morning" (1989), in which she gave a good account of herself as one of Jeff Bridges' paramours.

The 90s were a leaner period for Krige, but she returned to sleek territory as a vampire mother prowling about with her bloodsucking son in "Stephen King's Sleepwalkers" (1992) and as the wife of a headmaster of a bizarre school for servants in the Brothers Quay's very experimental "Institute Benjamenta" (1995).

TV has on the whole provided highly typical but also more reliable work for Krige, from her Irish immigrant in the turn-of-the-century miniseries "Ellis Island" (CBS, 1984) to the acclaimed Western miniseries "Dream West" (CBS, 1986) and in support of Vanessa Redgrave as transsexual Renee Richards in the well-done TV-movie "Second Serve" (CBS, 1986).

Although her TV credits include more routine and lurid thrillers like "Double Deception" (NBC, 1993) and "Donor Unknown" (USA, 1995), Krige has worked to add mystery and dimension to efforts such as "Ladykiller" (USA, 1992), and she continues gracing period fare, returning to religious sobriety as Rachel in "Joseph" (TNT, 1995) or as a Holocaust survivor in "Max and Helen" (TNT, 1990).

The mid-90s saw an upswing in feature film work for Krige, with three features all lensed in 1995-96: "Amanda," a boy and his horse story; "Hothouse/Ecophoria," a sci-fi film shot on high definition video; and the especially high-profile, "Star Trek: First Contact," in which she played the icy, mechanized Borg Queen.