NEW YORK -- Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno is not a star in North America -- yet -- and that's partly how she came to star in Love in the Time of Cholera. The film, a meditation on love that covers 50 years, involves a romantic triangle of characters played by Mezzogiorno, Javier Bardem and Benjamin Bratt. The film is based on the famous novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- one reason, says Mezzogiorno, that director Mike Newell wanted to make the film without any big Hollywood stars.

"He really wanted the film to have a different taste, with European actors like me and Javier, and with South American actors," she says. "So here I am."

The daughter of Italian actors Vittorio and Cecilia Sacchi, Mezzogiorno is certainly famous in Europe.

"But the star system is very different there," she says. "It's not so hard, like here. Here, it smashes you. In Italy, I can work and do my films, but outside of that, I disappear. This is a deep freedom."

And besides, she adds, since both her parents are actors, the paparazzi in Rome have known her since she was a teenager. "They follow you. If you provoke them with, 'Know what? I have something to hide,' then they jump on you. If you're just a normal person in your life, then they don't care.

"You're not interesting."

A native of Rome, Mezzogiorno first worked in Paris when she spent two years at the Peter Brook Workshop (Le Centre International de Creations Theatrales). She made her film debut 10 years ago in The Bride's Journey (Il viaggio della sposa) and won a handful of awards for her performance.

Among her films and TV work is Cristina Comencini's La Bestia Nel Cuore (Don't Tell), for which Mezzogiorno won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress at the Venice film festival.

In Love in the Time of Cholera, Mezzogiorno, who is 32, plays a character who ages from 17 to 70. It was difficult to get old, she says, "But it's harder still to go back to 17. My body language is about my story, about how I behave and relate to people and what I've lived -- my suffering, my moments of happiness, my shyness, whatever. When you're 17 or 18, you're like, empty. You don't have all those things on you, that cover you," she says, pretending to pull on an overcoat to indicate the accumulation of life experience.

"You are naked. To go back to that with your body language is very, very hard."

And to go into the future to age 70? "To get older, you see the process. You have five hours in the makeup chair, and see all the steps."

But that's just how they aged her face. Mezzogiorno concedes that seeing a shot of her elderly character without clothes on was a bit of a shocker.

"That's a body double," she explains, "and they did that in post-production. When I saw that, I was, 'Oh, my God,' that was shocking. I didn't say anything."