November 2, 2000
Getting Holt of business
Actor really learns the craft
By BOB THOMPSON
If a role for an exotic international nomad became available, Sandrine Holt would be up for the part.

These are her qualifications. The former Toronto-based modelturned-actress is British born with a Chinese father and French mother, and likes to move around a great deal.

During her brief career, the 27-year-old also has called L.A., Paris and Rome home.

Holt, based in New York now, was back in Hogtown recently to shoot Century Hotel, a David Weaver feature that profiles the use of a specific hotel room over a century.

Holt's segment has her playing a 1933 Chinese mail-order bride who has reservations about her Canadian future.

Also co-starring in separate segments are Canuck stalwarts Colm Feore, Tom McCamus and Mia Kirshner.

Some of the vignettes deal with murder, eroticism and melodrama, which is a sharp contrast to the Holt piece, defining restraint and things important but left unsaid.

"My character is brought over from China for an arranged marriage," Holt says at a west-end soundstage during a break from shooting.

"She ends up in the hotel room with the guy who picks her up when she arrives, but they don't actually become involved. Yet there is something that quietly passes between them, and it's slightly erotic."

As the story unfolds, the bride-to-be realizes there is more to "the business deal than she had realized."

It's a difficult portrayal that asks Holt to define nuance rather than exaggeration, but she's up to it. And she has worked hard at her acting craft to make sure she is.

In fact, the 5-foot-11 Holt has focused on removing the "former-model" stigma from her career profile. For the most part, she has been successful.

Her modelling career began when she was a 13-year-old St. Joseph Morrow Park student at the all-girls North Toronto private school.

Five years later, she "kind of stumbled" into her first film role in Bruce Beresford's Black Robe. That debut earned her a Genie nomination as best supporting actress for her performance as the native girl, Annuka.

From there, she won the lead as the Easter Island princess in the Kevin Costner-produced drama, Rapa Nui, and later earned praise for her part in Bruce McDonald's Dance Me Outside.

Playing the title character in the TV-movie Pocahontas: The Legend helped establish her as an actor, too.

More recently, she was in Loving Jezebels, which was released theatrically in New York and L.A., but doesn't have a Toronto date set yet.

"It's a romantic comedy," Holt says, smiling. "It's basically about a guy who goes for other men's women, and I'm one of the jezebels, precocious and slightly trampy."

Holt seems satisfied with what comes her way, as in: "Things are good."

She even got to take some cinema courses and made a short-subject documentary that she might shop around to film festivals next year.

"I wasn't really reflecting on what I wanted and what I was doing," says Holt, who moved from L.A. to New York five years ago to reassess her career. "I've always wanted to learn about filmmaking. I kept saying, 'Next year,' 'Next year,' and then, 'Next year.' "

Apparently, it was this year.

"I explored the more technical side of moviemaking," she says. "It's so cool and more challenging."

In a way, she has gone full-circle. Holt chuckles.

"Yes, it is. I was in the drama club at school," she says, then adds proudly, "but I did the sets."