AGE: 33. PROVENANCE: Rome (birth) and Paris (much of childhood). HIT THE SMOLDERING-LATIN JACKPOT by... landing the female lead in Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera (based on the novel by Nobelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez), in which her husband is played by Benjamin Bratt and her yearning would-be lover by Javier Bardem. "The producers have been great, because it was not easy for them to choose an Italian actress that nobody knows in the United States," Mezzogiorno says. "I mean, I was just happy that I met Mike Newell." BUT DON'T CALL HER AN INGENUE: Mezzogiorno has already walked down the red carpets at the Academy Awards-after the Italian psycho-thriller in which she starred in 2005, Don't Tell (original title: La Bestia nel Cuore, or "The Beast in the Heart"), was nominated for best foreign-language film. "It was an amazing night even though we didn't get the Oscar," she says. "It's such a great moment of cinema, really. In Europe we're not used to that kind of big, big machine. We have another mentality. We very much believe in minimalist things." ON LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA'S FLASH-FORWARD SEPTUAGENARIAN SEX SCENE: "Everybody prefers to see young people making love, but you know what? It's not as if you make love from 20 to 50, and then it's over. I hope that people can see how brave Mike Newell was to do that. We freaked out [filming the scene]. We were all very tense, because you have to have sweetness, it has to be believable, but at the same time, it has to be ironic. Because Garcia Marquez is never one thing or another."