Karen Allen walks back through Indy's door

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — She was Boone's girl Katy in "Animal House," and this was enough to cement her in the collective conscience of a certain kind of male.

This male was 13 when the National Lampoon comedy was released, in 1978; what he has retained in his mind's eye about Karen Allen are the freckles and long brown hair and big eyes, at once inviting and a little cool.

So what happened to her? Did she quit Hollywood or did Hollywood quit her after 1981's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and that classic opening salvo: "Indiana Jones. I always knew someday you'd come walking back through my door."

There was, less remembered now, 1984's "Starman," in which she played another loner tough girl — this one visited by an outer-space creature (Jeff Bridges).

But at some point, she turned to knitting in the Berkshire Mountains. There was also a marriage followed nine years later by divorce, and single motherhood that would, in concert with the dwindling Hollywood career and the shock of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, prompt her to quit Manhattan for the Berkshires.

She had done summer theater in Stockbridge, Mass.; she felt at home there. With her Hollywood money she had purchased an 18th-century barn and remade it.

Allen would make news but locally, in the Berkshire Eagle, under headlines like "Allen to Direct 'Batting Cage' " (she involved herself with local theater). The knitting thing grew into Karen Allen Fiber Arts, selling cashmere knitwear and accessories, with a store and a studio in downtown Great Barrington.

And then one day, early in 2007, the phone rang in her studio. It was Steven Spielberg.

He asked her to return to the long-rumored "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," reprising her tough-minded tomboy-fatale Marion Ravenwood.

Her coronation came last summer at Comic-Con in San Diego, live via satellite from the "Indiana Jones" set in Downey, Calif. "Hello, Comic-Con," cast members Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Ray Winstone said. Then Spielberg went off camera and trotted out the original Marion Ravenwood.

Allen, 56, appears to have left her face alone and kept her body trim with yoga (she ran a yoga studio in Great Barrington).

"People all want to know why I haven't been doing more films," she said at her country breakfast table recently. "It actually feels exciting to be able to talk about it.

"These days all somebody has to do is Google you and they know how old you are," Allen says. "I would show up for roles that were written for somebody in their early 50s, and people would say, 'You can't do that, you look too young,' but if I showed up for a role for somebody in their early 40s, then the people would say, 'Well, but she's 50.'

"I'm from a generation of fantastic actresses. It's a big pool of really wonderful actresses, and so many of them we never even get to see on the screen anymore."