Asked how she would know when she had hit the big time, the beguiling actor Taina Elg, who has died aged 95, said: “When people no longer trip over my name.”

When she arrived in the US in 1954 at the start of her contract with MGM, a newspaper campaign engineered by the studio and sponsored by Armour Star meat products offered readers the chance to win a six-room house or $25,000 cash by proposing a new name for this latest exotic star-in-the-making. Contestants were asked to send in suggested names along with labels from corned beef hash and devilled ham. This all came to nought, and she was still not-so-plain-old Taina Elg when she began appearing on screen.

She landed her first major US role in 1957 (the same year that the Golden Globes named her New Foreign Star of the Year) in the Gene Kelly musical Les Girls. Newspapers were still helpfully reminding their readers at every opportunity that her first name rhymed with “Dinah”. They were also prone to tell them, as the Times-Tribune did in 1958, that Elg was “the only Finn of note” at that time in Hollywood and “the first from her country to become a genuine star of cinema

In Les Girls, directed by George Cukor and with music by Cole Porter, Elg held her own alongside Mitzi Gaynor and Kay Kendall as dancers in a cabaret troupe headed by Kelly. Based on Constance Tomkinson’s reminiscences of her time in the Folies Bergère, and showing each character in succession looking back on the troupe’s glory days before acrimony set in, the film’s use of contradictory perspectives made it the closest thing to a musical take on Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Elg’s performance as the apparently lovelorn and suicidal member of the group won her a second Golden Globe.

She followed this with Imitation General (1958), in which she was a French farm worker involved with a master sergeant (played by Glenn Ford) who impersonates a dead general to keep up his platoon’s morale. The role was played entirely in French.

I’m the only Finnish actress working here,” Elg said the following year. “Yet of the six films I’ve made, I have portrayed a French girl four times.”

Watusi (1959), in which she was a missionary’s daughter rescued by explorers and caught up in their jungle adventures, took the unfashionable route of making her German.

In the same year, she starred in the second adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (and the first in colour) as the netball coach who ends up handcuffed to the hero, here played by Kenneth More, as he is pursued by assassins.

Elg was born in Helsinki, and raised in assorted other Finnish locations, including Turku, by her mother, Helena Doroumova, and father, Åke Elg, who were both pianists. During the Finnish-Soviet wars, the family were forced to leave, returning to Helsinki only after the end of the second world war.

Taina trained as a ballet dancer from an early age and was accepted by the Finnish National Ballet as a child, which led to a handful of small roles in domestic films. She also danced at Sadler’s Wells and at the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in Paris and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, before an injury led her to reconsider her career.

She was spotted in London by the producer Edwin H Knopf, brother of the publisher Alfred. After an impressive screen test directed by Mel Ferrer, she was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM in Hollywood. Small roles followed in two films starring Lana Turner – the biblical tale The Prodigal (1955), in which Elg played a slave, and the 16th-century romance Diane (1956) – as well as Gaby (also 1956), with Leslie Caron as a French ballet dancer

The career high-point of Les Girls was never equalled. For the remainder of her career, Elg worked mostly in television and theatre. Occasional exceptions included Hercules in New York (1970), which gave an early starring role to the young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 1962, she headed the national touring production of Irma La Douce. In 1973, she starred on Broadway in Look to the Lilies, as well as understudying Julie Christie as Yelena in a production of Uncle Vanya. “I didn’t get a chance to go on and play it, as Julie was in excellent health,” she said.

In 1982, she originated the role of the philandering hero’s mother in Nine, the Broadway musical based on Fellini’s 8½. Her son was played by Raul Julía, with whom she had also starred in the 1974 revival of Where’s Charley?, for which she earned a Tony nomination.

She briefly found her way back to cinema thanks to two directors with a taste for the power of nostalgia. Mike Figgis’s thriller Liebestraum (1991), which was also Kim Novak’s final film before retiring, gave Elg her first movie role in more than two decades, as the matriarch of a department store business. She was a teacher in the romantic comedy The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), starring and directed by Barbra Streisand. Her final screen role came in the Finnish caper Kummelin Jackpot (2006).

Elg is survived by her son, the jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim, from a five-year marriage to Carl Gustav Björkenheim, which ended in divorce in 1958. Her second marriage, to Rocco Caporale, an academic, ended with his death in 2008.