“I think that Sable will always be a part of me,” Mero says. “Every time people interview Sean Connery, they ask him about James Bond. I don’t think you can be someone for so long and have people not relate it to you in some way. But that is not who I want to be known as for the rest of my life.”

If Sable is in her past, wrestling may not be. “Right now I have no intention of going back to wrestling. [But] I never say never, because life can take you full circle.”

You know the Law of Doors: Those that are left open are eventually walked through.

She gives out the borders of her upbringing, but wants to save the details for the book. Born Rena Greek, she was raised in Jacksonville, Florida, contentious, disobedient, in and out of trouble - and poor. Two sisters, one brother. Father was a construction worker. Mother held odd jobs.

At age 15, she moved out and quit school, around the same time that her parents were breaking up. Today, she has a scattered relationship with her mother, who lives in Germany, and no contact with her father, although he still resides in Jacksonville. After leaving home, she moved in with a much older man, whom she married at age 19. She bounced across several jobs, working for an office-product company, a law firm, and an insurance company, before enrolling in modeling school.

Her husband was violent and abusive right from the start. Eight years into the marriage, he died in a car crash. “I went from one bad situation right into another,” Mero says. “I left home at 15 because things weren’t going so well. Going into this relationship, I thought it would be better. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

“It was a very tragic eight years of my life. It still affects me very much that a man that I was so much in love with died so tragically. But it affects me even more that I endured so much pain and suffering for eight years.”

What endures from the marriage is Mero’s daughter, Mariah, now 12. “The thing that changed my life more than anything else in the world is having my daughter. You want so much to give her everything that you possibly can. It made me feel very responsible. It made me feel needed, like there was something in this world that I was definitely good at - being a mother.” One night at a Florida steakhouse, a waiter approached her with a napkin bearing the message, “Do you like me, yes or no?” and pointed out the guy who passed it along. It was a burly professional wrestler who said his name was Marc Mero. “I kept the note for about 20 minutes, deciding what I was going to do with it,” Rena says. “I drew my own little box and wrote, ‘Maybe,’ and sent the note back.”

The two married in 1994, yet Rena doesn’t believe that meeting Marc so starkly altered her life’s path. “I think it would’ve basically gone down the same course, other than taking the detour through the WWF.”

Her dream now is what it has been from the time she was modeling: to become an actress. Mero has had guest spots on a few TV series that traded on her Sable fame, but her first big job is a TV pilot called “The Consultants” that she’ll shoot in August. She plays a member of a team of Las Vegas private investigators. It’s from the same people who served up “Baywatch” and “Pacific Blue,” so expect that a sexy wardrobe will be part of the show. Dennis Rodman costars. She is serious about her acting; Mero isn’t merely looking to transfer her mighty Sable image onto the screen. You might say she has no wish to play Rena, Warrior Princess. “It’s not so much that I want to be an action hero,” she says. “I would welcome the opportunity to pursue many different characters.”

She’s been taking classes for about a year, but she counts her three years with the WWF as acting experience. Wrestling was another form of acting, only sweatier.

“Wrestlers don’t actually get scripts,” Mero says. “We have writers who write some of our dialogue. We go over what we will be performing in the show that night maybe a couple of hours before we go out, as to who’s going to win and what’s going to take place in the match. “A lot of times the wrestlers talk to each other while they’re out there. They’ll say, I’m going to do this to you now, and then the other wrestler will say, okay, then I’ll do this to you, and it just goes back and forth. It’s a dance. One person leads, and the other person has to follow.”

Mero says that personal feuds can interfere with or alter the choreography of a match, to the point where it nearly becomes a genuine fight.

“If you were to tell your opponent, I’m going to punch you and I want you to go down, your opponent might say to himself, ‘I’m not going down for you.’ And then, in the middle of the match, when you know that person was supposed to go down and he’s still standing there, it throws everything else out of balance.

“It may be that you don’t enjoy working with a person, and maybe you don’t want to make him look as good as you would another person. So it can become very tense out there, as well, and I know sometimes when you lay those punches in, you lay those punches in. Fortunately, I worked with people whom I trusted very much, but I have heard stories, and know of people who have run into that problem.”

She is aspiring, earnestly self-promoting, and she bristles when challenged, the sort of woman who usually gets called ballsy, which is the favored sibling of bitchy. She would have to be to have risked what she has risked. If the acting doesn’t connect, Rena Mero would be in danger of becoming famous for having been famous.

But Mero doesn’t worry about her fortunes caving in. “If I ever do have to go back to being poor, I can do it,” she says. “I’ve been there, I’ve done it. I’ve lived through it.” That’s unlikely. She says she’s invested wisely. She splurged only on a house, a five-acre Orlando-area estate with the works: tennis court, elaborate furniture, fine art. “It’s absolutely beautiful, and that’s something that I’ve never had in my life. That’s the one thing that I have rewarded myself with.”

With the lawsuit a year behind her now, she ultimately got what she was after. “Now I get to pick and choose my own career choices. I know exactly what I want to do. No one is in control of my life but me.

“That’s what the entire dispute was about,” Mero says. “I saw my character going in one direction, and they saw my character going in an entirely different direction. I wanted my character to become more of a spokesperson for the company. I wanted her to not do any more bikini contests, not do any more striptease evening-gown matches.

“I wanted my character to evolve. I wanted people to know that there was something more to her than just this sexy woman who got her clothes ripped off on TV every week. I wanted people to know that she was intelligent. I wanted them to know that she could speak well. I wanted them to know that she had brains, that she had substance, that she was very capable of defending herself, that she was very strong-minded and opinionated. I wanted them to know that there was something more to this character...”

At some point in that fierce and winding thought, one knows it was no longer Sable she was talking about.