Indy Isn't the Only One Making a Comeback

But that isn't the type of thing that Marion would waste time worrying about, and it doesn't much bother Allen either.

"I was just glad that they were willing to hire a 56-year-old actor to play opposite [Harrison Ford]. Often somebody who's 35 will come in and be paired with an actor who's 65, and that usually aggravates me. . . . Often, I feel like it's unbelievable, too," she says. "I'm just not somebody who thinks that once you hit 40 you should be put out to pasture."

But she did hit the gym, getting up "that hour and a half earlier" every morning, partly for vanity's sake, she admits, but mostly because "Indiana Jones" action sequences aren't for the feeble. On the first day of shooting, she and Ford were in the back of a Russian truck jerking along a rutted, jungle path -- and in take after take they had to leap through a metal window to the front of the vehicle, adding new bruises every time. "It was sort of delightful and funny, and we were just looking at each other going, 'Yep, here we are again, 27 years later.' "

Only this time, they took those kneepads every time the stunt coordinator offered. "And," she recalls requesting with a laugh, "why don't you throw the elbow pads in, too?"

After almost three decades away, Allen had less than three months to prepare and couldn't have predicted how thoroughly she'd be enthralled, once again, with the art of making a movie. Particularly this one.

Allen's character didn't appear in the second or third "Indy" flicks, though most fans held her up as the adventurer's one great love. After decades apart, the two are reunited in "Crystal Skull" while trying to save a mutual friend in Peru.

"There's something about being in a film like that and being paired as these two characters that everybody seems to really love together. That made it so much fun to come back together," she says. "I felt really energized by the whole experience."

Which puts a 56-year-old fiber-arts entrepreneur with a hell of a past and "full and very fascinating" current existence in an interesting position. Allen, a single mom, stepped back from acting largely to have more time with her son, Nicholas Brown. With him away at college, her life has opened up. "I feel as though I can go out into the world a little bit more," she says.

This latest adventure with Indy only whetted her taste for more.

"I don't know if it's a reasonable expectation to think that I would be able to go back and have a real ongoing career," she says. "I just think that it's tricky. There just aren't that many wonderful things being written for women in their 50s and 60s."

She sold her place in New York a few years back, so the small-town quiet is her permanent home. Allen is glad for that, even as she finds herself peeking over the mountains more and more to see what else is out there.

The khaki-clad brunette who beguiled Indy and legions of others can always focus on her company, "and have a really interesting day-to-day experience in that world," she says. "And then if there's something else out there for me to do, I'm ready, willing and able.

"So, it's actually turned out beautifully, I think."