You could be forgiven for thinking that Karen Allen crawled into a deep hole 27 years ago and perhaps was consumed by snakes. Her best-known role, Marion Ravenwood, Indiana Jones’s fabulously feisty love interest in Raiders of the Lost Ark, hasbeen exhumed by Steven Spiel-berg for the new film. So, what has she been doing in between?

Doing some research on her as I prepared for this interview, I found amazingly little information. The most interesting story was from a local newspaper in the Berkshires, a rural retreat not far from Boston, Massachusetts, written in 1996. The interviewer had watched Allen teaching a class in ashtanga yoga, a gruelling form, at Berkshire Mountain Yoga, a school she had set up. Allen had an intriguing - and, I thought, wise - answer to a question put to her about whether she saw herself as an actor or a yoga teacher. “If we identify with a certain role we take on in life, it can limit who we are,” she said. “I act. I teach yoga. I teach design and multicolour knitting. I’m a mother. There’s all sorts of things I do with my life.”

Clearly, she wasn’t someone who had ever felt burdened by Hollywood celebrity, or by its passing. And, as she and I chat, I sense she’s completely free of the disabling neuroses and anxieties that, perhaps not surprisingly, afflict so many Hollywood actresses of her age. Allen is now 56, still strikingly beautiful, and possesses an extraordinary lightness of spirit that everyone who knows her remarks on.

“I didn’t expect they would necessarily bring my character back,” she says brightly at her home in the Berkshires, where she has lived, on and off, for the past 20 years, “so I was thrilled when Steven called me out of the blue and told me they had written this wonderful role for me.” It’s a character Allen still has a great deal of affection for. “When we first meet her in Raiders of the Lost Ark, she’s living in a bar in Nepal, drinking men under the table, speaking Nepalese, ordering large crowds of people around, very much in control,” she recalls. “And when Indy walks back into her life, she greets him by giving him a good right cross to the chin. She was a really unusual, interesting, independent person who had learnt to survive under difficult circumstances, but also somebody who had fallen in love with this man at a tender age and had never really got over him.”

As you may remember, after that intense lovers’ reunion, Marion flies with Indy to Egypt, where they hope to find the Ark of the Covenant, only, among other perils, to be trapped in a temple full of snakes. “When I read the script, that scene was maybe a page,” Allen says, “so you don’t visualise that you’re going to be up to your knees in snakes every single day for two or three weeks.”

Allen now admits with hilarity that, while shooting Raiders, she didn’t have any idea what kind of film it was. “I didn’t know these cliffhanger serials that George Lucas and Steven had based it on. So I really had a completely different picture in mind of the movie we were making than the one we were actually making.”

Like everyone else involved in the new film, Allen is forbidden from revealing anything about it, but she divulges that Marion has changed in the intervening years.

(The film is set in the 1950s.) “I think I can probably tell you that they haven’t seen each other for a long time as the film begins,” Allen says. “She has been living life on her own terms again, and she’s more sure of herself. She was buffeted around in the first one, but she’s now a bit more take-charge, more grounded and more capable.” Harrison Ford evidently loved working with Allen again. “She’s one of the easiest people to work with I’ve ever known,” he says. “She’s a completely self-sufficient woman, and that’s part of the character she plays. It has to do with her spirit and her nature.”

Everyone seems to have had a grand time making the new film. “Steven has such a beautifully smoothly running machine now, as opposed to when we shot the first one, when he was working with many of the cast and crew for the first time,” Allen says. “He showed up on the set every day like a tickled adolescent. He was so excited to be doing it, and was in such a great frame of mind - there was just a lot of light energy around the making of it.”

Allen admits it was surprising that she had ended up making such unabashedly commercial movies. Although she grew up in a family with few artistic pretensions - her father was an FBI agent, her mother a teacher - in her teens she became entranced with experimental theatre after seeing the revolutionary Polish theatre troupe led by Jerzy Grotowski, an important influence on the pioneering director Peter Brook. Allen joined a theatre company in Washington, DC, that had been started by one of Grotowski’s students.

When she moved to New York, Allen studied at the Strasberg Institute, where Harvey Keitel learnt his craft, and with Stella Adler, who mentored Marlon Brando.

Given such high-brow training, Allen is still slightly startled that her first movie was the 1978 frat-boy romp Animal House, directed by John Landis and starring John Bel-ushi. The film, for those who follow such things, features a shot of the young actress’s bare bottom - a scene she initially refused to do until her co-star, Donald Sutherland, suggested he bare his as well. “I thought he was so sweet to do that, so I sort of let go of my objections and said, ‘Okay, if Donald Sutherland is going to bare his bottom, by golly, I’ll bare mine too!’”

Allen has less fond memories of Cruising, which she made a couple of years later. Al Pacino played a cop who had to go underground in the gay S&M scene to find a serial killer who was killing gay men; Allen played his wife. The film was vilified by the gay community. Allen says she took the partmainly because she wanted to work with Pacino, a huge star after Serpico, The Godfather: Part II and Dog Day Afternoon. “The controversy was incredibly painful for Al,” she recalls. “People would throw things at him when he went from the trailer onto the set. It became very, very difficult. It was, for me, a very dark film, and I just have never had a good feeling about it. I know Al was disappointed in how it came out.”

After the success of Raiders, Allen wanted to use her celebrity “to go back and work in theatre”. She starred in The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller, directed by Arthur Penn, which ended up on Broadway. She did another play after that, and soon, she says, “people were asking, ‘What happened after Raiders? You didn’t work in film?’ But it was because the things that fascinated me were not films, they were plays.”

Not that she ever stopped making films. She’s starred in more than 40 film and TV productions since Raiders, including The Glass Menagerie (directed by Paul Newman), The Perfect Storm and In the Bedroom. She worked less in the 1990s, when she was bringing up her son as a single parent. That’s when she opened her yoga studio. She has given that up, but still runs Karen Allen Fiber Arts, her textile-design company (www.karenallen-fiberarts.com).

“Since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by textiles and patterns and colour and texture,” she says. “I saw myself needing to be in one place to raise my son, and thought, what can I do to make my every day seem creative and interesting? When an interesting job in theatre or film would come along, I’d do it if I could figure out a way.” Allen also teaches drama at a liberal-arts college in upstate New York.

I wonder if she is now dreading being dragged out of her relative anonymity for the huge hoopla of the new Indy film, including the premiere in Cannes. “I’m just intending to enjoy every minute of it,” she says. “As you get older, all the pressure falls away and you think, ‘Won’t this be a blast!’ ”

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens on May 22

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