It’s a happy birthday to leggy Dane Connie Nielsen, who turns 42 today. We’ll celebrate with some shots of her in her birthday suit, though it’s not mere prurience, I assure you. Whenever I think of Nielsen, I think chiefly of her temptress’ work in 1997’s The Devil’s Advocate (above), I suppose because I randomly stopped in Albuquerque during a solo cross-country drive and caught the movie, which proved the perfect trashy-delight diversion for a heat-addled mind. I look at that screen-cap now, though, and think, “Sweet Jesus, she looks skinny.” I mean, I know a thing of two about sucking in one’s stomach, but what’s up with that middle shot?

Nielsen is interesting as an actress because, like Juliette Lewis, she can look alternately stunning or a bit haggard and run-down — va-voomish and dangerous (The Ice Harvest), casually attractive in a foreign-correspondent kind of way (The Situation), something a bit more severe (Basic) or even a little more suburban (One Hour Photo). Without dipping into a bag of prosthetic tricks, there’s a subtle range to her mere physicality that not many actresses possess. While she doesn’t necessarily elicit heaps of sympathy (a function of the roles she’s offered, really), check out some of her Danish work if you’re not convinced of her talents.