Connie's gladiator-sized mission

What actress wouldn't want to go to Mars with Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle and young hottie Jerry O'Connell? 'That's right. That's what I said,' laughs Connie Nielsen, the Dane whose name will most likely be everywhere once the cut-throat summer blockbuster season is played out.

It is no coincidence that Nielsen bagged the leading female role in both Brian De Palma's Mission To Mars and Ridley Scott's Gladiator (opening next month in the UK). Both films are expensive, big-studio, big-name-director epics. She graces them because she's good. Very good. Quite extraordinary, in fact, because the films are as wildly divergent in theme and quality as it is possible for two films to be.

Word that Mission To Mars was on the launch pad had people very excited. But once the film was released in the States, lift off was too slow to guarantee success at the box office. The critics liked the special effects - and not much else. But Nielsen's right to call it 'a big entertainment movie' because it certainly entertains and 'does raise some intriguing questions'.

Perhaps Mars itself is the jinxing factor - the mystical red planet that played havoc with Pathfinder's pictures and swallowed up NASA's latest interplanetary probe. As Nielsen says, 'The Romans called it Mars because it moved in a strange way, in an ellipse across the sky. They thought it moved like a warrior.' Nielsen, you can sense already, is not the new Denise Richards, the girl so lambasted for her embarrassing attempt at being plausible as a techno-boffin babe in The World Is Not Enough. If only Richards had the Dane's brains.

Playing a cosmonaut was a special challenge. 'Being convincing with that kind of dialogue is important for all of us, not just women,' Nielsen laughs. 'I wanted to make sure I knew about the character's kind of life, her tasks, what kind of people get chosen for the mission. The more you know, the more you relax into it. You can be sitting around in a cockpit playing with buttons, but if you imagine you just might take off and go with it, people are probably more inclined to believe what you're saying.'

Though Mission To Mars was indeed a testosterone-heavy set, Nielsen says she didn't notice it much. 'Except for when the guys were talking about sports. I did mention to them several times that I wasn't very interested - so if could they please cut out the radio contact when we got to the baseball results.'

Tougher on this mission was being wired for sound inside a spacesuit weighing a good deal more than the occupant. Having to dangle in space and to feign weightlessness compounded the uncomfortable factor. 'It was hard and tiring. You really needed a massage at the end of the day.'

Nielsen is better than the movie, which shoots itself in the foot at times with embarrassing gaffes such as the supposedly 'world' mission's raising of an American flag on Mars. 'Yes, I think that was an oversight on the part of the writers. It is indeed a world mission. And I thought what a great opportunity that would have been to think what a world flag would have looked like.'

The role that made Hollywood sit up and notice Connie Nielsen was in 1997's The Devil's Advocate. Playing the devil's daughter, Nielsen bared pretty much all and writhed very impressively. Though she was remembered for her breasts rather than her acting, Nielsen says she had no qualms about taking the role. 'I liked her. She was a lot of fun and it was an opportunity to ham it up. I definitely jumped at it, and of course the chance to work with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves. It was a good story and good fun. Nudity can be very hard and very embarrassing and that's all I have to say about that particular part of the role.'

Nielsen did what she had to do to get noticed. She'd won that role by virtue of a positive review in Hollywood trade bible Variety before she'd even set foot on American soil. She made an American film while living in Rome which was 'terrible'. Presumably the best thing about it, Nielsen moved to New York and within a month she had The Devil's Advocate. Asked how a European actress develops a foothold in Hollywood, she laughs and says she had 'no plan. And I couldn't write a book on how to do it'. Since The Devil's Advocate was not terrible, it seems that Nielsen's gamble in derobing paid off - it led to a role in the moderately successful Soldier opposite Kurt Russell, followed by a part as a German junkie in Permanent Midnight and a small role in the excellent Rushmore.