She’s Changing the Face of a Supporting Role : Movies: Actress Rossy de Palma has added her unforgettable quality to Pedro Almodovar and Robert Altman films.

She has made a career of turning supporting roles into memorable feasts for the senses, from the lovelorn television interviewer in “Law of Desire” and the frigid virgin in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” to the romantic lesbian maid in “Kika” who dreams of running a female prison so she can be “surrounded by women all day long.”

Others may get the leads in the Pedro Almodovar’s movies, but Spanish actress Rossy de Palma is the one with the unforgettable, Picasso-like face and the irresistible deadpan delivery.

Even in her brief appearance in her first American film, as a designer’s assistant in Robert Altman’s current “Ready to Wear,” De Palma manages to make a lasting impression.

“I think Rossy is capable of doing anything,” says Altman. “And she has this fantastic face and stature which are so unique, I can’t take my eyes off her.”

Neither, apparently, can anyone else. With her porcelain skin, her long, straight black hair and a face seemingly rendered in several planes by Picasso or perhaps Modigliani, De Palma, who never went to acting school, has acquired a celebrity status she never actively pursued.

“Because of Pedro (Almodovar) I became famous without having done anything special,” said De Palma in an interview on a visit to Los Angeles. “Now I feel more comfortable with this celebrity thing, but at the beginning it was exaggerated. I’ve always distinguished between fame and popularity. Fame is what you get if you do your job well for a long time. Popularity . . . the woman who cuts her husband’s penis is popular! Popularity is cheap. What seduces me isn’t fame but the job itself.”

The daughter of a bricklayer father and a mother with “artistic inclinations,” De Palma, 30, acquired a kind of local celebrity status as a singer with the rock band Peor Impossible (Couldn’t Be Worse), with which she traveled from her native Mallorca to Madrid in 1986.

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Already an Almodovar fan, she met the director in the Madrid nightclub circuit, and he eventually offered her a part in 1987’s “Law of Desire.” Her only previous film experience had been as an extra, a nun, in a German B-movie.

“I knew I wanted to work in film, but I’ve always done things in a certain unconsciously conscious manner. Things just work out . . . other friends hounded Pedro, but I seduced him by keeping my distance,” she says with a smile.

Her encounter with Altman was of a much closer kind. While in Paris modeling (her “hobby,” she says) for a Jean-Paul Gaultier fashion show, her agent arranged a meeting with Altman at a dinner party.

“(Altman) said, ‘Do you want to work?’ and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, of course,’ and I was shaking his hand and I said, ‘This is a contract, otherwise I’m not letting go of your hand, eh?’ And that was it. We made a deal, and it was marvelous.”

De Palma talks in short, half-connected phrases that pour out in quick succession, as though attempting to keep up with a stream of unchecked thoughts. But her demeanor is sedate and unassuming, contrasting sharply with her colorful screen personas.

When lunch arrives in her hotel suite (two eggs, sunny side up and fries), she’s the one who sets the table and later buses the dirty dishes.

And she professes to lead a normal life in Madrid, where she lives with her boyfriend of eight years, Santiago Lajusticia who played her rapist brother in “Kika.”

“I suppose people like me because I’ve always been very unpretentious, and I don’t think I’ll change. . . . If you become a (presumptuous) idiot, you miss out on many things,” she says. “Although I suppose many people don’t like me at all, but of course, no one ever says that.”

But De Palma has far more fans than detractors, it appears, and most of them are enthralled by her unconventional beauty.

“People with no noses,” sniffs Altman, “that type of person is the person who doesn’t find her beautiful.”

Of her distinctive look, De Palma says, “I have my personality so no one has ever asked me to change my look,” she says. “(My looks are an advantage) and I’m not changing to please some because I’ll probably end up displeasing others. I’d rather please myself first, because I’m the one who matters.”

She is now filming Almodovar’s new film, “La Flor de Mi Secreto” (The Flower of My Secret), in which she plays a housewife in the suburbs.

“It’s a very pretty movie, very special . . . it deals with a woman’s feelings. She’s a writer and her husband is leaving her. It centers more on one character, and it’s perhaps more intimate (than Almodovar’s other works).”

Once more, De Palma has a supporting role, as the star’s sister, but this doesn’t bother her in the least.

“I don’t have ambitions of stardom, unless I really like the role,” she says. “I’m more interested in the character than in the number of lines I have in the movie.”

And although she has a few “small projects, some small offers” in the United States, nothing has been signed yet.

“I plan for the short term,” De Palma says with nonchalance. “I don’t like to get my hopes up. Whatever comes my way, if I like it, I’ll do it. And this year, specifically, I want to do only those things I really like.”