HOW DO YOU SUCCEED A LEGEND, ESPECIALLY WHEN THAT LEGEND IS AUDREY HEPBURN, AN ICON OF ELEGANCE, INTELLIGENCE AND STYLE? JULIA ORMOND TALKS TO JESSE KORNBLUTH ABOUT REMAKING SABRINA IN HER OWN IMAGE. PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER

There is no shortage of young actresses who look great in leather and latex. There are plenty of young actresses who can feign delight in roles that ask them to be nothing more than an accessory for an egocentric male star. But it's nearly impossible to name even a half-dozen young actresses who can credibly play a beautiful woman, capable of powerful emotion, who comes from a good family. When Edward Zwick was casting his end-of-the-frontier Western Legends of the Fall, he looked long and hard for an actress who could play the Boston Brahmin adored by Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn, Henry Thomas and Anthony Hopkins. After months, he chose a virtual unknown from England: Julia Ormond. For First Knight, a retelling of the Arthurian legend that will be hitting thousands of theaters this summer, Jerry Zucker needed a regal beauty who could hold her own against Sean Connery and Richard Gere. He plunged ahead with Julia Ormond. And then came the biggest plum of them all, the title role in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina, due just before Christmas. Pollack had met with Winona Ryder and Juliette Binoche. But when it came time to select an actress who could stand up to Harrison Ford and the memory of Audrey Hepburn's indelible performance in the 1954 original he, too, had to have Julia Ormond.

For an actress who didn't appear in a feature film until 1993, this is heady stuff. But like Flaubert who, as Henry James put it, "felt of his vocation almost nothing but the difficulty" Julia Ormond doesn't regard her breathtaking ascent as justification for drinking Champagne until dawn. With good reason. For one thing, she knows that every journalist she meets this season will want to compare her - favorably or not - to Audrey Hepburn. For another, common sense tells her that a launch this triumphant is invariably followed by critical reappraisal and, often as not, outright hostility. Mostly, though, there is the simple fact that Julia Ormond is passionately determined to preserve a privacy that no one thought to invade until about ten minutes ago.

So the Julia Ormond who ventures out of her temporary apartment near New York's Lincoln Center to confront an interviewer in a borrowed office is nothing like the beautiful childwoman of the movies or the confident presenter at the Academy Awards who was expertly coiffured and voluptuous in a Carmen Marc Valvo frock. She wears an austere black Calvin Klein suit and carries only a tiny container of Kiehl's lip gloss and a copy of The Economist to ground her. In the absence of makeup, she's aII powerful brows, aquiline nose and hazel eyes that project a tense intelligence. Even as she settles herself, she seems on the verge of flight - not because, at 30, she lacks social skills but because she is so honestly torn between the desire to satisfy her interviewer and her insistence on protecting herself (At no time during the interview, for example, does she even reveal the existence of her steady boyfriend; a doctor in London.)

"As an actress, I appreciate that modern filmmaking goes hand in hand with a large amount of publicity, but I keep my private life private," she says carefully, struggling for a tone that forecloses personal questions without sounding imperious. "I'm walking a tightrope here. If I say nothing, it looks as if there's something going on and I'm hiding it. But my private life is my escape, my way of keeping a reality check."

If this is a performance, it's a breathtaking one. Her studied cadences, the way she holds her face to the light and her hands clasped neatly in her lap. In a few gestures, she creates the very portrait of sincerity. But there is no director to cry. "Cut." She does not break eye contact. She says nothing to fill the silence that follows. And so I banish images of a gifted actress and see the woman - Julia Ormond - who, having thought long an hard, feels she has to make a stand.

This willingness to draw a clear, bright line between accessibility and privacy can be variously interpreted. Arrogance? Ormond hasn't earned the right. Shyness? Maybe. But, I suggest, her self-protectiveness seems more Iike reserve.

"What's the difference between shyness and reserve?" she asks.

"Shyness can be pathological," I say. "Reserve is a decision, the result of examining the world and deciding you want to live at one remove."

"Yes. That's it. I've chosen this."

That choice is very close to the spirit of the title character in Billy Wilder's 1954 film Sabrina. As played by Audrey Hepburn, she begins the movie as a jumble of dewy-eyed enthusiasm and distancing intellect. She's also a classic beauty, which makes her situation more poignant. For although Sabrina lives in a mansion that, an omniscient narrator tells us is "as close to heaven as you can get on Long Island" she's not the daughter of the owner. Because her father is a chauffeur "of considerable polish," the narrator notes. Her view of the privileged life is from an apartment over the garage.

It's quite a view. The mansion has indoor and outdoor pools, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, a Gatsbyesque lawn that rolls out to the dock and a staff so large there's a man to tend the goldfish. Of course, Mums and Dads are a bit . . . stiff. No matter. The place is so cushy that both of their grown sons are in residence. One is a committed bachelor (Humphrey Bogart) who run the family's empire. The other (William Holden) is a committed playboy whose greatest achievement is his polo ranking.

Sabrina has loved the playboy since forever; he has never noticed her. Then she goes if to cooking school in Paris and (mostly offscreen) learns about "life." When she returns to Long Island, she's so sophisticated, so chic, so transformed that the playboy brother not only notices her - he forgets that he's engaged to another woman.

Now the complications kick in. The playboy's bride-to-be is the daughter of a mogul who's about to sell his company to the business-minded brother. To keep that deal on track, the hard-bitten brother arranges for the playboy to have a minor accident, nothing serious, but he won't be able to court Sabrina for a week or so. This gives the business-minded brother a clear route to declare his "love" for Sabrina.

The chauffeur is appalled by any romantic alliance with either brother. "Life is a Iimousine," he lectures Sabrina. "Front seat. Back seat. Window in the middle." But love conquers class differences. The playboy does his duty and goes through with his long-planned marriage. And Bogart's character discovers that his own feelings for Sabrina are real - he rushes out of his office and sails to France with her. With that, Sabrina jumps to the upper rung of the upper class, which is, we're meant to conclude, the right destiny for her.

A fable about an English chauffeur's daughter scaling America's social heights might have made sense in the class-conscious '5Os, but it's hard to see how that theme translates to the Darwinian '90s. So Pollack as shrewdly elected to emphasize Sabrina's English origins, and to change the focus. "In this version," Ormond says, "it's more about the way money and power behave."

That approach to Sabrina does much to explain why Julia Ormond is right for the part. She grew up in Surrey, has four siblings, a father who's a business man and a mother who was a biochemist, and was heavily influenced as a child by grandparents who paint and carve. She went away to school at the correct age and spent a year at the West Surrey College of Art and Design. Only there did she begin to dream of chucking art and studying acting.

"One of my art teachers came to see me act in a school production," she explains, warming to a safe memory. "Afterward, he said, 'Have you thought about drama school?' I admitted I had, but I didn't think I'd get in: I can see my painting next to other people's work, but I can never see how I act. Then he said, 'Would you rather spend three hours painting or three hours rehearsing.?' It was as simple as that. So I took a chance."

Acting school led to an agent and theater in the provinces. She won the 1989 London Critics' Award for Best Newcomer for her work in Christopher Hampton's Faith, Hope and Charity, was nominated for a Canadian award in 1992 for her television performance as Catherine the Great and starred that same year as Stalin's wife in an HBO film. Along the way, she married - and divorced - an English actor. And then, of course, came the blur: three high-profile Hollywood productions, a switch in representation to the all-powerful Creative Artists Agency, an invitation to the Oscars and constant, accelerating pressure.

Ormond has found that drawing remains one way to hang on to a hard-won sense of self. "The more I go on, the more I marry art and acting," she says. "They come from very much the same source. A lot of the processes are similar. My art teachers taught me about creating, letting go and re-creating and the courage that involves, and the price that costs and how you ultimately come up with something better if you're not afraid. We worked at covering the canvas completely in the first twenty seconds, which is like having no holds barred when you rehearse. And a awareness of composition and balance, that's in acting, too.

In Sabrina, the painting has already been created, as it were. Givenchy's unforgettable clothes and a performance that brought Hepburn her second Academy Award nomination in as many years, as well as five other Oscar nominations, including ones for best screenplay, best cinematography in a black-and-white film and best costume design (for which it won), that's a lot of history for Sydney Pollack and his actress to overcome.

"I'm not trying to re-create Hepburn, I'm trying to re-create Sabrina" Ormond says, eager to make the distinction. "A lot of designers very sweetly stepped forward and offered me clothes. But [costume designer] Ann Roth and I have taken a definite slant by not using a specific designer, other than Ann herself. What Sabrina brings home from her time in Paris is a notion of style, and that's seen not so much in the clothes she chooses as in Sabrina herself."

Ormond has, I know, just returned from a trip of her own, to Las Vegas, where she'd been named "Female Star of Tomorrow" at an industry gathering. I point out that, just before she started Sabrina, Hepburn was named "Golden Girl of the Year" by the theater owners.

"Oh, really," she says nervously.

"Hepburn and Holden had an affair while they were making Sabrina."

"Greg Kinnear, who has the Holden part, has had a girlfriend for a long time."

"Hepburn was a size 4."

"I'm an 8, but I vary."

Although Hepburn's parents were far from poor, she grew up in Europe during World War II. She knew what it was like to be hungry."

"And before things started to go well for me, I was in real trouble financially, aIong with half the bloody country."

"And when it started to go well?"

"I had my moment of flippancy," she says with a laugh. "Oh, yes, I can shop. But I like to think I'm coming out of it."

It occurs to me suddenly that comparisons to Hepburn are beside the point. The real comparison is thematic - three directors in a row have chosen Ormond to enact essentially the same drama. In Legends of the Fall, a trio of brothers and their father are all vying for her favor. In First Knight, both Connery and Gere want her. And now, in Sabrina, she's the object of a primal battle between brothers.

What does she make of that?

"Don't mess with the bros," she says, with a throaty, almost sensual laugh.

"Seriously."

"Sabrina deals elegantly with the situation. In Legends of the Fall, my character makes a complete pig's ear of it. She gets completely dragged down."

Ormond pauses, eyes closed, brows furrowed, showing me why directors love her so - she's most beautiful when she's thinking.

"Betrayal in relationships is a large part of our lives," she says firmly. "It's a big issue for women. It's caused instability in women's lives for a great part of this century. I have a real fascination for it. I've been trying to understand it, really understand it. Can women become truly independent - financially independent - so a husband going off with someone else won't be such a calamity in our lives? Is there a way you can betray or be betrayed and yet come out of it clean? I don't agree with actors waxing lyrical about politics, but think of the number of government figures tainted by scandal. It's a question: does morality or immorality affect someone's judgment? I think there's something sinister about this, particularly in England. I believe that people who have affairs are more likely to be people who can't talk about and confront their problems. And I don't know that people who can't express themselves are the best people to run the country."

I'm dumbfounded but I'm starting to see that consistency between private and public personae is a big issue for Julia Ormond. Which is, as I think of it, very much like Sabrina. She, too, has a strong moral code. And her code is not only a smart one, but one that wins. And at no point along the way is she reduced to being a sex object.

"One of the wonderful things about the film," Ormond agrees, "is the reference to MiIton's Comus, which is the story of a water nymph named Sabrina who is saved from a fate worse than death. But here, Sabrina is the savior. In most movies, a woman gets her man, and when she doesn't, she's incomplete or she commits suicide. In Legends, my character kills herself. In First Knight, Guinevere loses Arthur and Camelot is brought down. It's very unusual in a film that it's the woman who saves the man."

Ormond is beginning to fret. Dialogue has become monologue; has she revealed too much? But I can't lose her without asking her the one question that the female filmgoers of America most want answered. Which is, of course, this: "You shared a house with Brad Pitt during the filming of Legends of the Fall. Is he, as People magazine claims, the sexiest man alive?"

"All the men I've worked with have a strong sexuality, and that usually gets heightened on the screen," she says carefully. "In the flesh, you're faced with the oddity of having to extract that history in order to respond to their new character."

"Is he or isn't he?"

"Brad has an extraordinary screen magnetism, but I have no idea who the world's sexiest man is," Ormond says. Then, with a wry smile that suggests she just might reveal a secret, she concludes: "But I do like to think the sexiest man in the world is not an actor."