AMY IRVING’S PREGNANT PAUSE

“Everyone said, ‘Of course you know what will happen the minute you get pregnant? You’ll be offered the most important role of your life and you won’t be able to do it.’ And I said, ‘But this is the most important role of my life. . . .’ ”

Amy Irving is having her first baby in six weeks’ time, and her career--which until recently dominated her thinking--has suddenly taken a back seat.

She is pleased to admit it. The actress who, after a rash of good notices last year for “Yentl” and her performance on Broadway in “Heartbreak House,” was saying, “I can’t afford to stop--I’ve wasted too much time already,” has readjusted her priorities and given in completely to motherhood. And together with the baby’s father, zillionaire film director Steven Spielberg, is now “thinking of nothing else.”

“We’ve both really changed,” she said the other morning. “We’re so anxious to meet this child. And Steven’s going to be in the delivery room, of course.”

She and Spielberg, her consort on and off for the past nine years, have already chosen names for the child.

“We’ve decided to call the baby by Steven’s last name,” she said. “I couldn’t bear to saddle it with a hyphen. Anyway Irving-Spielberg sounds too much like a law firm. So if it’s a girl she’ll be Sophia Augusta; if it’s a boy we’ll call him Max. At the moment we refer to it as the Irv-Berg baby.”

She now looks almost exactly as she did last year when she was playing the role of Dudley Moore’s pregnant mistress in Blake Edwards’ comedy “Micki and Maude.”

“I had such fun then parading around as a pregnant lady,” she said. “Now here it is actually happening to me.”

And once it has happened--sometime around the beginning of June--she says quite frankly that her career can go take a running jump.

“I’m totally unambitious now,” she said. “All I can think about is this child. It makes everything else seem utterly unimportant.”

She herself is a little bemused by the change in her attitude. “I’d never have believed I could change so much,” she said. Particularly after her career, which had coasted along unspectacularly for some years, suddenly seemed to take off.

“Yentl,” in which she starred with Barbra Streisand, began it. Then came last year’s New York triumph in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Heartbreak House” at the Circle in the Square. In this she pitted her acting talent against the formidable Rex Harrison--and won raves.

“Amy Irving is a revelation,” said Time magazine. Newsweek was just as glowing.

Could this be the same Amy Irving who had been so easily dismissed by some critics for movies such as “Honeysuckle Rose” and “The Competition”? It could.

What some New York reviewers forgot, of course, was that she had been trained for the theater.

“I went to drama school in London and grew up around theater people,” she told me (her father, the late Jules Irving, was artistic director for the Lincoln Centre Repertory Company). “So I always wanted to be known as a stage actress.”

Her theatrical ambitions began to be realized five years ago when she made her Broadway bow in “Amadeus,” playing Mozart’s wife, Constanze. Two years ago she appeared at the Santa Fe Festival Theatre in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”--and it was this performance that landed her back on Broadway.

Now the original cast of “Heartbreak House,” minus three members, has been assembled again for the television production of the play, which airs on Showtime at noon and 8 p.m. Tuesday.

And she is delighted.

“I always wanted a copy of the play so I could have something to show my kids,” she said. “Oh yes--I plan to have more than one. I’m very proud of it.”

She was, in fact, four months pregnant when she arrived to do the TV production. And before she arrived, a publicity still from “Micki and Maud” landed on the desk of a Showtime executive who became highly nervous. “I knew she was pregnant,” he said. “I didn’t know she was this pregnant.”

“In fact it didn’t show,” she said. “But it was a difficult time for me. We had just seven days to shoot in, and I used to get very tired. One time we worked from nine in the morning until one the next morning.”

Immediately following this she was due to fly to Rome to star in Orson Welles’ production of “The Cradle Will Rock,” but at the last moment--as has so often happened in Welles’ checkered career--the financing fell through.

“I was so looking forward to doing it,” she said. “We were all doing it for scale just for the chance to work with Orson, and it’s a gem of a script. It’s such a shame. . . . But I’m sure it will be done one day.”

The film is the story of the staging of the Marc Blitzstein play by Welles’ Mercury Theatre in 1937. Irving was to play Welles’ then-wife.

“But as the start date got put back further and further I became worried about how to hide my pregnancy,” she said. “Then Orson called and said he realized that his wife had become pregnant while he was actually directing the play so there was no reason I couldn’t play it pregnant.

“I was really sorry not to do the movie, but on the other hand I wouldn’t have missed being with Steven at this time. It’s such an important period for both of us. We were together the first time the baby kicked. And after I’d gone alone to buy my first maternity-type dress he said: ‘What? You went without me?’ He doesn’t want to miss out on anything.”

There had been rumors--and a story in a New York newspaper--that there had been some opposition to her appearing on the recent Academy Awards show because of her condition.

Was this true?

“They asked me to do it before anyone knew how pregnant I was and at the time I said no,” she said. “Then Steven agreed to appear and I changed my mind. When I didn’t get an immediate answer back from the Academy I was told there had to be a meeting to discuss it. I understood their thinking; after all, I’m pregnant and not married. Maybe they were worried about how I’d come on.” (Says an Academy spokesman diplomatically: “There were discussions about everybody who was to appear on the show.”)

Although she now shares Spielberg’s home, which is being extensively remodeled in preparation for the coming child, Irving still maintains her own home in Santa Fe, where she is on the board of the Festival Theatre. Last summer she and her mother, actress Priscilla Pointer, did a play there together--Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.”

“I grew up watching my mother play some of the great classic roles,” she said, “so it was a wonderful experience to be in a play like that with her.”

She still tries to go to New Mexico now and again. But she has gradually come to terms with Los Angeles, a town she once professed to dislike.

“The problem was I hadn’t found my own center here,” she said. “So I never felt secure. So I took off for three years--to Europe for ‘Yentl,’ to India for ‘The Far Pavilions,’ to New York for ‘Heartbreak House.’ This still isn’t my favorite town but now that I’m so happy I could be anywhere. When you’re happy you make your own world, don’t you?”