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Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

December 11, 2011 by · Comments Off on Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, IT was dusk on the Sunset Strip here when Noomi Rapace swooped into an oak-paneled bar, looking nothing like herself. Swathed in crepe the color of orange sherbet, her skin luscious, her hair tousled, she could have been any starlet making the rounds. But she might have been Someone. Eavesdroppers craned their necks, not quite sure.

Then, a murmur of recognition from a banquette just beyond. “It’s her,” a man whispered furiously to his companions. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo!”

These days Rooney Mara’s pale, pierced visage looms on billboards for David Fincher’s take on the Stieg Larsson novel, the first of the Millennium trilogy best sellers. But for fans of the original Swedish films, Ms. Rapace (pronounced Ra-PAHSS) will forever embody Lisbeth Salander, Larsson’s avenging angel: razor sharp and tough as tungsten, a tiny freak of nature able to bring a man twice her size to his knees.

That might have been her face up on the billboards. But Ms. Rapace didn’t even consider auditioning; she wasn’t interested in dwelling on a character that had consumed her for a year and a half, transforming her from a well-regarded Swedish actress into an international sensation.

“I was done with her,” Ms. Rapace, 31, said, sipping peppermint tea at the Sunset Tower Hotel and looking remarkably normal for someone specializing in the psychically ravaged. On the last day of shooting the trilogy’s concluding film, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” when producers arrived with Champagne, Ms. Rapace ran to the bathroom and vomited. “I was throwing up for 45 minutes,” she said. “I couldn’t stand. It was so clearly my body throwing Lisbeth out.”

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