Olga Sosnovska

On the Stands 21 October: Soap Opera Weekly: "Chatter Box" feature with Olga, Lianca Contest 7 October: Soap Opera Weekly: Two page Lianca Spread. 14 October: Soap Opera Weekly: Lianca Picture Also, a full page Olga pin-up in SOD's Super Soap Opera Fan Guide for Fall 2003. On the Screen Olga's appearance on "The Vice" will be shown on BBC America on 13 October starting at 9pm EST. official site http://www.sosnovska-symposium.com

Interview - Olga Sosnovska - Kissing Robson was like..peeling spuds. By COLIN WILLS. 1,556 words 26 August 2001 The Sunday Mirror English (c) 2001 Mirror Group Ltd EXCLUSIVE: OLGA THE TAKE ME TEMPTRESS ON LOVE SCENES AND WIFE-SWAPPING THE group of lads having a beer in the bar next door to the studio suddenly forget all about the Arsenal match when Olga Sosnovska walks past. "It's 'er," they whisper, steam rising from their crew-cut heads. "It's that wife-swapping bird." Such is the price of arriving virtually out of nowhere to become the sexiest thing on British television this summer. Olga has pushed the male temperature gauge well into the red zone since she was paired off with Robson Green in the ITV drama Take Me, the climax of which is screened tomorrow night. The sexual electricity between them in the series, set among professional people on a plush estate who swap partners as casually as they swap recipes for chicken Kiev, has turned Take Me into one of the most controversial series for years. We met on the day Olga flew back South following a filming assignment deep in the pine forests of Scotland. Even in the Highlands, where the only things that swing are the pipers' sporrans, they went through the nudge-nudge, wink-wink rituals when they caught sight of her. A gorgeous woman playing a wife-swapper. How close to the heart of the male fantasy bank do you want to get? And, when you come to mention it, how un-British. "That's what I thought," Olga, who was born in Poland, says. "You think of Britain, you think repression, you think unemotional, you think the sort of characters played by Hugh Grant. When I first read the script I thought: 'What a bizarre thing to choose to do.' But apparently it's going on all over the place. It's quite the fashion among up-and-coming business people, I'm told. When I mentioned it to my girlfriends expecting them to squeal with laughter they'd say: 'Oh yes, my sister lives on an expensive estate and they're at it all the time.'" Take Me was filmed in Newcastle, Robson Green's home city, where he can do no wrong. "He's a sex god up there," Olga says. "I was having my legs waxed in Newcastle one day and happened to mention I was in a series with Robson. You should have seen the reaction. Everyone stopped work, they all wanted to see for themselves the woman who was doing love scenes with their hero. I sensed a lot of envy in the air. I bet they charged me double." Sadly, the only person not getting hot under the collar about what Olga and Robson were getting up to was Olga's husband. "It's disappointing really. When we watched it he laughed out loud at the very scenes I thought would make him insanely jealous. That's the trouble with being married to an actor. They know it's just a job, like peeling potatoes." NOT that Olga's a stranger to the raunchy scene. Her first appearance on British TV was in The Vice, where she was the girlfriend of a detective played by Marc Warren. "He had a taste for bondage and at one point I was chained naked to a bed. Marc was more nervous than I was. Like everything else, it looked much sexier than it was. We both wore what they call 'modesty pads' which are sort of sideless knickers. "We did voice-overs for the sound track, jumping up and down on the mattress to get the noise of twanging bedsprings and going: 'Ooh, yess, aaaah', to give the impression of sexual abandon. I don't think I would do it now, but it was my first TV job and so I grabbed it. In Take Me, for all its swinging and sexiness, I never appear nude. I left it to the other actors to do all the work in that department. "Beth Goddard, who plays Robson's wife, and myself hammered on the director's door on Day One and said: 'We're not doing it.' Robson was sort of duty bound to appear nude, he being the North-East sex colossus. But deep down I don't think he enjoys it all that much." Take Me, with tomorrow's shock ending, could open the door to international stardom for 28-year-old Olga. Later this week she flies off to live in America, and her husband, an American, is house-hunting in New York. The Atlantic crossing is more for his sake than Olga's. "It hasn't worked out for him as well as he hoped over here. He thinks he'll get more opportunities back home. So I'm going with him. He stayed over here for my sake, so I'm going over there for his." They made a pact when they first met that they would never name each other in interviews. "We both want to be self-sufficient and not use each other for anything. We met at drama school, but it was nothing like love at first sight." They have been married for two years and she refers to her husband as "probably the most beautiful man in the world". Then, fearful she's been too serious, she adds: "Mind you, I've always been short-sighted. Those blokes at the bar, for instance. I'd never have realised they were staring at me if you hadn't told me." The couple spend a lot of their time apart. "It's horrible, but when we get back together, it's always like a second honeymoon." It's good to see her so happy, because her childhood in Poland was blighted by danger. Her father Andrew, a heart surgeon, and her mother Nina, an English teacher, were both political activists at a time when the country was poised between Communist repression and freedom. One night the dreaded knock on the door came, and Andrew was taken away and thrown into jail. "We didn't know where he was being held for quite a while. As it turned out, he was lucky because the jail was relatively humane. A lot of other prisoners were transferred to prisons where they were routinely beaten, a couple of them so badly that they died. I was only 10, so the danger my father was in didn't hit home. As a kid you think everything is going to have a happy ending. "I only visited him once in the six months he was in jail and I thought he looked ever so handsome because he'd grown a beard. Times were hard without him, but we got by mainly because of food parcels from the West. Also my mum knew lots of farmers and they helped us out. You had to use the black market, otherwise you couldn't survive. Even the petrol my mum put in the car to go and see my dad was illegal." The family's ordeal ended when, to their amazement, the authorities allowed Andrew and Nina to move with their family to Britain. THEY found themselves in Leicester where Andrew was quickly offered a top medical job and Olga and her brother went to local schools. For Olga, it was like landing on another planet. "I was 11, but I felt so much younger compared to the British girls. They were all wearing white stilettos, they all had boyfriends and sexuality was rampant. I wasn't on the same wavelength. I was quite lonely, especially before I made my first friend. But the people of Britain as a whole I loved. I never experienced any hostility towards me because I was foreign, none." As she's got older, and flitted between the two countries, Olga has had a chance to compare English and Polish men. "I've had one English boyfriend. He was my first proper one. I was 17 and it turned out to be quite difficult. I was mates with a friend of his. But my boyfriend thought he was trying to get off with me. It ended up in a huge fight. I just wasn't used to it. In Poland it's quite normal to have close friends of both sexes. But here the sexes are separated." It seems to be the Poles rather than the British who lead the field in the social niceties. "It is not unusual over there, when you are introduced to a man, for him to kiss you on the hand. And you'll never see a man sitting on a bus while a woman is standing." That said, Olga is still a huge fan of the Brits. She loves us for giving her a home, for making her welcome, for allowing her the chance to become an actress. Only in Scotland last week, filming an episode of Monarch of the Glen, did she think she might have made the wrong choice. "It was the midges," she said. "Swarms of them. "It almost made me think I'd prefer wife-swapping," added the woman who has made swinging the most talked-about subject in front of the nation's TV sets this summer. Then her natural reserve kicked in. "Almost. But not quite."