JUST YOUR 'BASIC' MOVIE STAR DANISH ACTRESS CONNIE NIELSEN COMMANDS ATTENTION IN MILITARY THRILLER.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

``I'm a very uninteresting person,'' Connie Nielsen says laughingly during a phone call from her home in New York. She knows it's a funny thing for one of the most intriguing actresses - with one of the most unusual back stories - working in movies today to say about herself.

Best-known for her portrayal of the Roman royal Lucilla in the Oscar- winning blockbuster ``Gladiator,'' Nielsen downplays her striking looks and emphasizes physical and mental acuity in the two films she appears in this month: ``The Hunted,'' now in theaters, and ``Basic,'' which opens today.

In ``The Hunted'' she plays a tough-as-nails FBI agent on the trail of a highly trained killer; in ``Basic,'' Nielsen's military investigator, Lt. Julia Osbourne, has one night to unravel a mind-bending mystery surrounding the murders of several troopers in the Panama Canal Zone.

``I've always been curious about what it's like to play a traditional genre character like an FBI agent or military personnel,'' says the Denmark native in perfect American English. But she's not just playing tough girls. ``I just see them as people who are in a position, because of their jobs, to tackle certain problems. They do so with emotion and temerity, but also with courage. So you have a lot of different registers to play on, which is always great.''

The ``Basic'' role required several major concessions on Nielsen's part. She had to maintain a convincing Southern accent, not the easiest thing when the concept of the South one grew up with is Schleswig-Holstein.

``I wanted the audience to realize that Connie was the detective, and there was so much plot early on that it was a task to make sure who we were following, over whose shoulder we were watching the party,'' explains the movie's director, John McTiernan (``Die Hard''). ``The notion was a simple little Southern girl discovering something so appalling and corrupt, and I love the way she does it.''

``She gets stuff out of her role that may not necessarily be there,'' adds respected former studio executive and ``Basic'' producer Mike Medavoy. ``Somehow or other, Connie puts a little bit extra into it. That, basically, is what does it for her.''

``Basic'' required taking extra off, though. To give Osborne an all-business air, Nielsen's luxurious blond locks were severely chopped (``It's just hair, it doesn't hurt,'' she reassures us).

What did hurt, though, were the posture-straightening men's boots Nielsen was required to wear throughout the shoot.

``I just had these boots that were extraordinarily heavy, but at the same time, the heels were sort of rounded, so they stacked them up to make them straighter, I guess. I don't know if it was made that way so I'd walk differently. But it made them more painful!''

She's chuckling again. If Connie Nielsen ever has a problem on the job, it seems, she's had a way of cheerfully putting up with them since the beginning.

Nielsen first became interested in acting as a child, watching her mother put on what is, apparently, a Danish tradition of satiric political skits every summer. After working in some of her mother's productions, the teenager headed to Paris, where an uncle lived. Although hardly a professional at the time, she quickly landed her first break.

``After a little more than a month, I met a producer at a dinner that I'd been invited to. He asked me what I did, and I bravely kind of lied a bit and said I'm an actress. He said he was casting this role, and the next day I was at a screen test. And I got it! It was, like, this horrible movie, but at time I was just like, 'Wow, I'm actually doing this stuff.' ''

The 1984 film (English title: ``How Did You Get In? We Didn't See You Leave'') might actually be considered a masterpiece in the country where it was made, seeing as how the French inexplicably consider its star a god.

``I was the young girl in this comedy with Jerry Lewis that he was doing in France,'' Nielsen recalls. ``He was also my first film kiss. I was 18 years old, and he was 65 and had just had open heart surgery.''

Sounds gross. But it wasn't.

``Oh, he was the best! Let me tell you, Jerry Lewis is a great kisser. And he was also so nice and so professional, I just admired him so much.''

Further adventures as a European starlet included a stint on a television series in Italy that she thought was going to be dubbed (the common practice at the time) but at the last minute was shot in Italian, which she had to learn in a few days. Typically sunny Nielsen upshot? She's now fluent in six languages, and she bought a house in Italy that she loves to this day.

``This is what's fun. The actor having to deal with whatever situation arises, that's the cool part.''

Real life can be more trying, though. Sometime during all of this, Nielsen married and divorced; she refuses to talk about the relationship to this day. Her 13-year-old son Sebastian lives with her in New York.

Nielsen wound up on this side of the Atlantic after failing to nab a role in American director Lawrence Kasdan's ``French Kiss.'' He didn't think she was, well, French enough for the part, but he did think that she ought to give Hollywood a shot. She took the filmmaker's suggestion, halfway - besides being closer to home, New York offered live theater possibilities - and within her standard career-establishment cycle of one month landed the showy role of Satan's daughter in the supernatural thriller ``The Devil's Advocate.''

Since then, she's worked steadily in such diverse films as ``Rushmore,'' ``Mission to Mars'' and ``One Hour Photo.'' Coming up is the controversial French film ``Demonlover,'' and Nielsen will soon complete ``The Great Raid,'' in which she plays a real-life American woman who organized underground resistance in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation of World War II.

Different experiences, to be sure. And you can bet she's got a sunny attitude about all of them. But Connie Nielsen could go for something really different the next time around.

``I'm hoping to start a romance or a comedy, something that's not so heavy. I'm just hoping to go another place emotionally.''

The shadow of war

Though not a war movie, the military murder mystery ``Basic'' is hitting theaters during a time of war. As always in such situations, questions rise about the conflict's impact on the film's commercial potential.

The fact that the twist-filled thriller also shows a number of individual soldiers in a highly unflattering light further complicates the issue.

The film's cast and crew hope potential audiences will be able to separate entertainment from unpleasant reality.

``The stuff that's going on in the real world is far too important to evaluate in terms of this movie,'' says ``Basic's'' director, John McTiernan (``The Hunt for Red October''). ``I think it's pretty obvious that the movie isn't really political, and that it takes place within the military but is not about the military. Yes, there are good people within the military and bad people within the military, just like any other industry. That was pretty much the premise.''

Connie Nielsen, who plays an Army investigator delving into drug smuggling and killings at a base in Panama, says the suspense elements far outweigh ``Basic's'' military trappings.

``It could've been put just about anywhere. The idea was to create a deception that was masterfully done. I always felt it was incidental that it was set on a military base. What we used that for was to put it into some kind of real context, this base that was about to close as the Americans left Panama. It was just a way to make things even more tense.''

Co-star John Travolta feels that the movie ultimately makes a positive statement about the armed services.

``The brilliant thing about the military is that it's a self-correcting organization and always has been. That's the beauty of it; very few organizations are self-correcting, and in reality most organizations have various areas that need to be corrected. So I was kind of proud of the fact that some of the guys in this movie can go in and handle everything and get the bad seeds out of there. You need to do that in order to be successful at anything.''

Whether ``Basic'' will succeed at drawing moviegoers away from their concerns about the war in Iraq remains a mystery.

``I don't know,'' Nielsen admits. ``You never know how people will react to these things under unexpected circumstances. Certainly, when we were shooting the movie, nobody was thinking about these possibilities at that time. It's something new that we have to deal with all of a sudden. I just hope that people are gonna go see it.''

- Bob Strauss

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Great Dane 

With `Basic' and `The Hunted' in theaters, Connie Nielsen proves she knows the drill

(2) Two investigators (John Travolta and Connie Nielsen) have conflicting agendas in ``Basic.''

(3 -- 5) Nielsen has taken diverse roles in ``Gladiator,'' left, ``One Hour Photo'' and ``The Hunted.''

(6) John Travolta takes down Brian Van Holt in ``Basic'' as Connie Nielsen, left, looks on. Though the film takes place on a military base, war does not figure in the plot.

Box:

The shadow of war (see text)