by SP

"Guess Who’s Coming Back?" PART 2

Marina’s Medium, Karina Lombard

From the IMDB and Karina World websites, we learn that Karina Lombard came from a very mixed heritage. She was born on January 21, 1969 in Tahiti to a Lakota Indian mother, Nupuree Lightfoot, and a Swiss-Russian-Italian father, Henry Lombard. She was an Indian medicine woman and he was an heir to a Swiss banking dynasty, an aristocrat. Her parents got divorced when Karina Lombard was only a year old and she and her four siblings moved to their father’s mansion in Spain.

Her family moved around a lot and Lombard attended several private Swiss boarding schools where she became fluent in English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. She was raised in her father’s culture and it was difficult for her. As she mentioned in her Curve interview, “Growing up [I got called] ‘savage’, ‘bastard’. Because you look different, you’re from a different background and you’re not from the same country – you weren’t in the same country two years ago and you speak another language than we do. But it doesn’t matter; it’s good because it trains you to rise above.”

Her father’s family wasn’t supportive of the Native American culture but Lombard said that she was always proud of her heritage. She talked about it with Curve Magazine, “when I came to America I was approached by Native American people, and they always knew what tribe I was from. I have to say I am so proud to be [Native], and it’s sad that I was raised completely away from it … as far as the Native American heritage, it is definitely very strong inside me. It’s in the music that I write … and I’m sitting there and this old Indian starts chanting and it’s coming out of me and I don’t know where it comes from, but it is always there.”

Lombard also mentioned in the same interview that her connections with that culture is so real and emotional to her that after getting the ‘First Americans in the Arts’ Award, she stated from the podium, “I promise you with all my heart that I will always represent Native Americans with the dignity and the wisdom that we deserve.”

Lombard’s interest in becoming an actress began when she was still a little girl. Growing up in boarding schools and away from mainstream, she saw her first movie in an old theater in the neighborhood. In the Curve interview she talks about this experience, “I saw this movie called Donkey Skin … with Catherine Deneuve … and it is one of the most beautiful fairy tales I have ever seen, and I knew I wanted to live my life like that. I wanted that magic and to live in that fairy world.”
 
During a visit to New York when she was a teenager, Lombard was discovered by a photographer Bruce Weber who was looking for a Native American for an ad campaign for Calvin Klein. She became a Calvin Klein Model and soon was pictured on the pages of Elle and Vogue Magazine.

While in New York, she began her artistic life in modeling, dancing and acting. At the age of 18, she landed a role as a half-Tahitian and half-English girl on the Canadian miniseries The Island (L’Isle) when the producer and director saw her photograph on the cover of the magazine 20 ANS. After that, in 1991, she moved to New York and auditioned for the Oliver Stone’s film The Doors and got a small part in that movie.

Two years later the director John Duigan cast Lombard for the role as a Creole Jamaican woman in Wide Sargasso Sea. Even though the movie wasn’t a big hit, her part received rave reviews from some movie critics, including Roger Ebert. For this role she won a ‘First Americans in the Arts’ Award.

She also took part on stage in the productions of “Uncle Vanya”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, “Summer and Smoke”, “M. Butterfly”, “Joan of Arc”, “Betrayal” and “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea”.

After beginning her career in movies, she appeared in The Firm (1993) seducing Tom Cruise’s character and was then hand-picked by Brad Pitt to play a Native American woman in The Legends of the Fall (1994). Before she was cast as Marina in The L Word, she also appeared as a slave girl in Kull the Conqueror (1997), a police chief in the Murder at the Cannes Film Festival (TV, 2000), and a photographer in Footsteps, also known as Deception (2001). The full list of her movie appearances can be found on IMDB and Karina World websites.

In addition to her acting, Karina Lombard also is an accomplished musician, singer and a writer. She previously had a music project with Cirque du Soleil. She sang the title track for the movie L’Isle and preformed live on stage in 2004 with Dorian Cheah. As a musician and a song writer, Lombard is working on her first music CD, which is set for release sometime in 2006.

Karina Lombard on Sexuality and the L Word

At the Paley Festival in March 2005 cast members were asked, “What is the one question that you’ve been asked all the time?” Without any hesitation they replied, “People want to know all the time who among the cast members is gay and who’s not.”

Most of the ladies on the show are pretty open about their own sexuality so what about Karina Lombard? In her July 2005 interview with Playboy Magazine she revealed that she had done it with both men and women, though after The L Word the women were no longer as exciting.

“Before The L Word I thought I was bisexual, but I don’t know anymore. Doing it with women on the show got so repetitive that it took the edge off doing it with women off the show. It got associated with work in my brain and kind of ruined it.”

She also mentioned in the Curve interview when replying about her sexual experiences, “… now, when I see a beautiful woman, I’m like, ‘Wow! She’s gorgeous!’ I’ve never had that whole thing of envy and jealousy at all. To me, a beautiful woman or a beautiful man turns me on. I honor that … I’m genuinely attracted to anyone that is beautiful. That’s true. And I won’t say more.”

In an interview with Planet Out Lombard said that the scenes with Mia Kirshner were her first onscreen love scenes she had done with a woman, “and personally, I do not have any issues at all about same-sex love scenes or same-sex anything. I grew up in Europe, and you know -- you love who you love, so I didn't have to prepare, you know what I mean? To me, it's the same as doing a scene with a man, but of course it's a different feeling because, in the case of Jenny, I'm much bigger than her, so I'm automatically the more dominant one.

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