SAN DIEGO COUNTY : Cattrall Ready to Emerge From Cocoon for ‘Misanthrope’

Kim Cattrall almost canceled the interview because she didn’t want her picture taken.

The 32-year-old star of “Mannequin” may have looked stunningly attractive with her platinum hair, dark brows and big green eyes, but she wasn’t so sure. She had been up all night, thinking about her part in “The Misanthrope,” opening Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse. Besides, she was “going through the struggle of putting the finishing touches” on her character, Celimene, and didn’t want to lose her concentration by being asked, shortly before rehearsal, to pose and talk about Kim Cattrall.

“I’m feeling very cocoonish because I’m about to unveil something,” she said just outside the door of the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts, where the show is being staged under the direction of Robert Falls, artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

It’s a role that is very important to her, in part because Cattrall feels she has so much in common with Celimene.

It’s more than a case of Cattrall, a Hollywood actress with more than a dozen movies behind her--including “The Return of the Musketeers,” scheduled for a September release and co-starring Michael York, Oliver Reed and Richard Chamberlain--being cast in Moliere’s classic work, transported in Neil Bartlett’s text to modern Hollywood.

In this setting, Moliere’s court intrigues (the constant waiting for the king’s summons) become studio machinations in which everyone jumps at the idea that the studio president might call.

It’s also a situation in which Cattrall finds parallels between the relationship of Celimene and her lover, Alceste, and relationships in Cattrall’s own life.

“I have learned a lot from the men in my life. I have been married to a German architect, and it was a very Alceste relationship,” said Cattrall, who was divorced in 1986 after four years of marriage. “Love can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be a terrible burden, especially if someone can only love you if you are a certain way and can’t accept you the way that you really are. It makes you feel very vulnerable.”

For Cattrall, the essence of the story is Celimene’s need to break away from the mentor-student relationship. In her 20s, she said, she could have made Celimene “bitchy.” Now, she says, she sees her “fear of intimacy and fear of being swallowed up.”

For Moliere, the self-mocking Woody Allen of his day who originally wrote the piece to star himself and his young wife, Armande, it was the tale of a man drawn into a corrupt society by his passion for a beautiful young woman who ultimately betrays him.

When the play was first unveiled in 1666, Moliere was tormented by rumors of his wife’s infidelities. Two years later, when the play was revived, the couple had separated and saw each other only when they appeared on stage together.

As Celimene is misunderstood by Alceste, so Cattrall feels she is often misunderstood by studios and audiences. Born in Liverpool, raised on Vancouver Island and trained at the London and American Academies of Dramatic Arts, she prefers the classics she has done on stage, such as “Wild Honey” (on Broadway), “Three Sisters” (at the Los Angeles Theatre Center) and “The Misanthrope,” to movies like “Porky’s” and “Police Academy,” which she did “to pay the rent.”

Of course, her film career comes less as a surprise when you consider that she was put under a seven-year contract with Universal Studios after a scout saw her not in Chekhov but in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in Toronto. Then, too, there is her platinum hair--so often associated with the ditsy blonde stereotype--which has been getting lighter with each movie.

She first dyed her naturally brown hair to contrast with Meg Tilly in “Masquerade.” In “Midnight Crossing,” she was given the option of going lighter or darker than Faye Dunaway. She went lighter.

Fittingly, her next two movies, which don’t yet have release dates, have her playing blondes in the 1950s--but strong, tough ones, she stresses. Not stereotypes. In “Palais Royale,” she co-stars with Dean Stockwell in a gangster movie. In “Brown Bread Sandwiches,” she co-stars with Giancarlo Giannini in a story about an Italian girl who moves to America and dyes her hair to look like Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow.

It’s a look she also feels is right for Celimene, who wants to become a Hollywood star. And a look she feels is definitely right for Kim Cattrall.

“I have a great time being blond,” she said with a smile. “On stage, it just glows .”

One part she doesn’t enjoy about the attention she draws is the letters she gets from fans she has never met who imagine that they know her.

“I’ve had threats,” she said, recalling with a shudder the recent killing of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, allegedly by a deranged fan. “I’ve had someone hire a private investigator to find me. The more recognizable I become, the more private I become.”

The stage may seem like an odd place to be private, but Cattrall finds she can get completely lost in her character--except, of course, when she is asked to give an interview or pose for pictures.

“I do stage because I really need to. I think it’s more of an actor’s medium than film is. The shows are different every day, the costumes are different, I sweat in a different place, I cry in a different place. It’s alive. No one can stop the take. No one can snip the action.

“There’s an immense amount of satisfaction. In one way or another, it’s an exorcism. It’s a need to tell a story, to touch, to affect, to relate to other people on a broader scope. It’s an incredibly exciting journey to grow with this character and then to share with audiences the things that Celimene can teach me.”