BOSTON – Diane Lane doesn’t look very much at all like Diane Lane … well, at least not the movie star Diane Lane, who got an Academy Award nomination earlier this year for playing the straying wife in “Unfaithful.” And certainly not like the long, auburn-haired star of “Under the Tuscan Sun,” which opens Friday.

On a promotional tour for the new film, Lane seems smaller than she does on screen. She is pretty, but without that WOW! movie glow. Dressed in a tight, burgundy-colored knit dress, her long auburn tresses of “Under the Tuscan Sun” have been shorn into a shorter do that’s a much darker brown. One might pass her on the street and guess she’s a pretty secretary, rather than a film star.

“I cut my hair off, and I do look quite different than I do in the movie … which is good,” Lane says with a smile. “Keep them guessing. I change all the time. A little bit here, a little bit there, because I don’t like to look the same all the time. I don’t want to be pigeonholed.”

And yet Lane, who has been acting since she was cast in “Medea” at age 6 at the La Mama Experimental Theater in New York and has been in films since age 13 when she played opposite Laurence Olivier in “A Little Romance,” knows that she has “made it.” Her grandmother told her so.

“My grandmother called and said, “You’ve made it! You’ve arrived! You’re in the crossword puzzle!’

“So now I know. Pop culture. I’m in!”

“Under the Tuscan Sun” is based, extremely loosely, on the bestseller by Frances Mayes who recounted the adventures she and her second husband had when they bought a rundown villa in Tuscany and transformed it through extensive renovations.

The book was also filled with recipes, as well as home-renovation advice. Much of that has been jettisoned by writer-director Audrey Wells in favor of a story about an unhappily divorced American woman who turns her life upside down when she buys a rundown house in Tuscany. Hope, romance and change are at the forefront of the movie version.

So, has Lane herself ever dropped everything to change her life?

“I’ve done it,” she replies quickly, breezily. “I’ve done it in marriage, out of marriage. Sometimes you need a dramatic shove off, often to a new horizon. I think it’s fascinating what she managed to do, which was to follow her heart. Somehow she managed to reach out more than I did, though.”

Over the years, Lane has had much-publicized stormy relationships with Timothy Hutton, Chris Atkins and Matt Dillon, later marrying Christopher Lambert, whom she met when they co-starred in the 1993 film “Knight Moves,” and who won international attention playing the title role in the 1984 film “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.” Now divorced, they have a 10-year-old daughter who came to visit her mother twice in Italy while Lane was making “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

On screen, Lane – the daughter of drama coach Burt Lane and singer Colleen Farrington, who divorced when she was 13 days old – has followed many new horizons. Her wealth of roles include Stella, opposite Alec Baldwin as Stanley and Jessica Lange as Blanche DuBois, in “A Streetcar Named Desire” on television; movie roles in “The Perfect Storm” and “The Cotton Club”; and the title role in “The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All,” in which she aged from a teenager to a woman in her 60s.

All that work culminated earlier this year with her Oscar nomination, a cataclysmic event in her life that she’s not eager to repeat, no matter how good the reviews are for “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

“I wouldn’t wish that on anybody,” she says with a broad smile. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

She had been in Italy shooting “Under the Tuscan Sun” shortly before the nominations were announced. “And I returned and they were in mid-campaign. And I said, “What do you mean, you’re in mid-campaign?’ The studio had put its money where its mouth was in terms of the fact that I was their nominee.”

So was she surprised by the nomination?

“Hugely. Hugely. You can’t not be surprised. Can you imagine the audacity of being disappointed? That’s the alternative.”

“If it were just that wonderful soiree and occasionally showing up for your fellow nominees’ celebratory moments, that would be fine. But it just seems to go to the fifth power.

“They tried to warn me just how much was involved. The sheer amount of invitations that come your way. I’m still carrying around thank-yous that I owe people for their sweetness and their bouquets and their generosity in that little moment I had.”

Many actresses at the age of 38 complain about the lack of roles for them. But Lane says she isn’t one for complaining.

“No, I would say that for some reason, because those roles are fewer and farther between they get more attention, so it sort of compensates over the quantity.

“I think there’s a lot more attention paid in our culture to women of that age because there are a lot more boundaries to shatter for women over 30, as there are for girls under 20, for better or worse.

“People are fascinated by the edges and breaking molds. That’s the edge of change.”

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