27 years later, Indy’s girlfriend is back too

What are the chances a director would call you to shoot a sequel 27 years after the first film?

For an actress, forbidden by Hollywood law from aging on screen, it’s about one in a trillion.

Karen Allen beat those odds last year. On the phone: Steven Spielberg.

He was preparing to make the fourth Indiana Jones movie, and asked if she would be interested in bringing back Marion Ravenwood, her character from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Did she have to mull it over?

“Uh, no! I don’t think so!” Allen recalls, laughing. “I was thrilled to pieces that they had written me into this story. And then when I read the script I was really, really happy with what they had done with Marion.”

Marion is the hard-drinking hustler who shared such wonderful chemistry with Harrison Ford’s Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the series-launching smash of 1981.

She was from the Katharine Hepburn/Jean Arthur/Carole Lombard smart-and-sassy school. Allen’s fresh-faced beauty and big, soulful eyes made Marion an irresistible double-threat: heartthrob and hurricane.

On Thursday, after being omitted from sequels two and three, Ravenwood returns in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” along with Ford, of course, Shia Labeouf as a motorcycle-riding sidekick and Cate Blanchett as a Soviet agent.

What’s it like picking things up so many years later?

“From the moment that Steven called me to reading the script, to seeing Harrison and meeting Shia, and starting to kind of come back into that world, it’s just been fantastic,” Allen says.

“I think somehow it’s just in my bones, my relationship to that character and to Harrison’s. We fell into that Indy and Marion mode. You know, he puts on that hat and the coat and that whip, and it just seemed to all fall into place from the first day.”

Before her first spin as Marion, Allen was clueless as to the Saturday matinee, B-movie-type serial she had signed on for.

“It was a genre I was completely unfamiliar with. I read the script to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and I thought we were making ‘Casablanca,’ ” she says.

“I just had a different film in my mind than the film Steven and George had in their minds. I didn’t know much about working in an action-adventure film. I was just always trying to figure out how to make the character work. But somehow it turned out OK.”

Allen, 56, lives in western Massachusetts, where she teaches acting and runs Karen Allen Fiber Arts, a knitwear design studio.

She’s acted in a slew of Broadway productions and more than 40 films, winning critical acclaim in Paul Newman’s “Glass Menagerie” with Joanne Woodward and John Malkovich, and John Carpenter’s “Starman” opposite Jeff Bridges.

Of course, “Raiders” is not her only iconic movie with a fanatic following.

In her screen debut in 1978, she played Katy, Boon’s frustrated girlfriend and the only cool-girl buddy of the hard-partying Deltas in “Animal House,” one of the funniest Hollywood comedies ever made.

” ‘Animal House’ is the film that will not stop celebrating itself,” Allen says. “Every 30 seconds there’s a reunion somewhere going on. What a pleasure to be in a film like that.

“And I so genuinely like the other actors. We we often get together, both in doing something around the film, or just as pals. So that’s been a great blessing in my life.”

Next came the outrageous success of “Raiders.”

“It’s pretty startling being in a film that gets that much attention,” she says. “There was a photo of Harrison and me on the cover of Newsweek magazine. It was scary, like, ‘Whoa, this is a little intense.’ “

Allen was suddenly the It Girl, flooded with offers. Instead of cashing in, she fled eastward.

“It made me want to go back and work in the theater,” she says. “I actually took a break after ‘Raiders’ and did two plays, one on Broadway and one off Broadway. In the theater you feel like you’re more in charge of your work.”

Marion is a great character, and rare. The current Hollywood refrain is that there are not enough good parts for women – especially for women over 40.

“There’s so many actresses that I never get to see on the screen,” Allen says.

“There’s a few extraordinary actresses like Meryl Streep, or Frances McDormand, or Susan Sarandon, but it looks like all of those roles are being played by a very small group, which I completely understand. I just wish there were more out there.”