A Field Guide To Olga Kurylenko

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Imagine our delight when we first got to see a few moments of Olga Kurylenko's bare ass on "Magic City." We were ecstatic! We're used to seeing her as the sexy portion of an action movie meal, but now she's on a serious (and seriously steamy) premium cable drama, and we're so darn happy for her that we're dedicating a field guide to her.

Olha Kostyantynivna Kurylenko was born November 14, 1979 in Berdyansk, Ukraine. Her father, Konstantin, left the family when Olga was three, so Olga was raised by her mother, Marina Alyabusheva, an art teacher. Marina has always been incredibly close with Olga, and she never minds it when her daughter gets cast in more revealing roles. In an interview with The Mirror, Marina said, "[Olga] grew up with the idea the naked body is nothing to be ashamed of. I painted her naked when she was about seven."

Perhaps it was this comfort with the body that got Olga noticed by a talent scout. When Olga was thirteen, she and her mother were vacationing in Moscow, and as they walked through a metro station, Natalia Krimenskaya, who ran a modeling school 30 miles outside Moscow, took one look at Olga and knew she was special. Thirteen was too young to be a model, but Natalia kept in touch with the family and gave Olga a chance a few years later. After getting a leg up from Natalia, Olga moved to Paris and started modeling professionally. She appeared on a bunch of magazine covers, became the face of multiple lingerie campaigns, had her body in a Victoria's Secret catalog, and missed her mother dearly the whole time.

She got her first taste of acting in 2003 when she appeared in Seal's "Love's Divine" music video, but her first big theatrical break came in 2005 when she secured the lead in "L'annulaire," for which she later received the certificate of excellence at the Brooklyn International Film Festival. Olga's first mark on mainstream Western audiences came when she played the badass, scantily-clad love interest of Timothy Olyphant in the film adaptation of the video game "Hitman." She donned the same ruthless eroticism a year later for another video game-based-movie, "Max Payne." All her work as a femme fatale paid off when she was selected (by Daniel Craig himself) to be the Bond girl in "Quantum of Solace." Olga was stoked, as was her mother, but some people were a little pissed.

You see, Olga is the first Bond girl who hails from a former Soviet country, and some of her countrymen--specifically, the ultra-left group known as The Movement of Communists of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast--said that she had committed "moral and intellectual betrayal" by appearing in a movie with James Bond, "the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies." Meanwhile, the mayor of her hometown tried to get a street named after her, and Olga and Marina got to meet Ukraine's First Lady, Kateryna Yushchenko! Of course, the best part about Olga becoming a Bond girl was her mother's reaction: she supported Olga in every possible way she could, spoke with her on the phone for hours when Olga felt homesick, and worked herself to exhaustion just to pay for the phone bills, but she still says, "...I knew that this was her moment. And you know what, all that struggle... I think it was worth it!"

And now look at her! Olga's beauty only seems to increase as the days go by, she's been married and divorced twice, and when she wants a part, she just grabs it. Seriously, from the way she describes getting on "Magic City," it seems like her involvement on the show was decided before she even auditioned. She's also in the process of filming a currently untitled science fiction movie alongside Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, and Andrea Riseborough. That movie sounds insane! (Sidenote: when you hear "Tom Cruise" and "science fiction movie" together in the same sentence, do you automatically think of Scientology? Because we do.) Homegirl does whatever she wants, and we are incredibly attracted to her swagger.

Also, as you can tell by the pictures below, we're incredibly attracted to Olga's body, too.

[At top: Olga Kurylenko gets all kinds of frisky in "Le Serpent" (imdb.com)]