JENNY AGUTTER--HARD ON THE TRAIL OF MEATIER ROLES

“I just want to get on with the meaty women’s roles,” said actress Jenny Agutter, who will play the fiery Kate in Charles Marowitz’s “Shrew” (loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”), opening Thursday at the Ensemble Studio Theatre.

“In England, I’ve made that transition from ‘young woman’ to ‘woman.’ Now I want to do that here. Look at the actresses who are doing it. Jane Fonda has gone from cheerleader to sexpot ingenue to middle-aged activist. . . . And there is a beauty of the lines changing around the face. We’ve got this whole cosmetic idea that we have to remain young. No. Beauty is at whatever age it is.”

The very beautiful Agutter, 33, British-born, raised in Singapore and Cyprus, should know.

“One is happy to have certain looks to be able to present,” she acknowledged. “But hopefully there are roles where that doesn’t matter. I’ve just done a ‘Twilight Zone.’ I was in a space mask and the only makeup was very plain--no lipstick, rouge. It’s more gritty. You get along with the lines, the work . You’re not relying on the look.

“But then I did a ‘Magnum’ a while ago and it was all looks, costumes, hair. Hopefully that (facility for glamour) is there, one can use it. But it shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all of one’s career.”

Nor should the perks of such high-profile work. And yet. . . .

“There’s serious theater, working for no money at all,” Agutter said. “And then there’s doing ‘Magnum’: flying off to Hawaii for two weeks, going to the beaches. A limousine picks you up at the airport, you go to a hotel room as big as a football field and you look out and say, ‘This is the life.’

“The funny thing is, I do rather enjoy getting thrown between the two worlds. Because then you start to realize that neither is particularly more real than the other. They’re just different ways of life.”

At the moment, however, Agutter (who resettled in the Hollywood Hills last year) is quite happy to be treading the boards of Equity-Waiver with writer/director Marowitz, with whom she’d earlier collaborated in a radical British production of “Hedda Gabler.”

“This ‘Shrew’ uses some of the Shakespeare text--and some new, modern material as well,” she explained. “It’s slanted from a more psychological point of view, less of the fall-about comedy. ‘Cause a lot of the jokes are not funny. The premise of the piece--that this girl doesn’t want to marry this man, but is forced by circumstances to do so--is not funny.”

Also not funny (and potentially scary) is the prospect of acting without the supports of conventional storytelling and staging. But 15 years of off-and-on stage work, mostly with Britain’s National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, have bred a solid confidence. (Agutter jokes that in her long-ago debut, opposite John Gielgud in “The Tempest,” “it wasn’t very clear to me what I should be doing with Miranda, but his Prospero was very clear.”)

“I started learning something about the stage then, but I yearned to get back to film,” she said. “Also, when you enter the business as a child, everyone treats you very gently, nicely. I wanted to go somewhere where I wasn’t going to be treated like that. And I was very lucky.” Soon after arriving in the States, she landed “Logan’s Run,” followed by “Equus” and “An American Werewolf in London.”

Now Agutter is hoping to combine the stage and film work here, have people look beyond the British label (when called on, she affects an effortless California accent) and really go to work. “When I started acting as a child, it was all games, pretending, falling off rocks into mattresses. Nothing to do with discipline. But games won’t sustain you later. So the stage work has helped me a great deal.”

And with the offbeat casting she enjoyed at the RSC (“a lot of difficult, neurotic, nasty women,” including Regan in “King Lear”), she’s begun to turn away from the earlier wholesome, sweet roles and seek out the “grown-up, aggressive, go-getters. They’re fun to play,” she defended. “And one should come to terms with the ambitious elements in oneself--because the ambition doesn’t go away. It only gets stronger.”