Focus on 3 Legends : A veteran actress marks her Los Angeles theater debut by portraying the 19th-Century’s Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse and Ellen Terry.

Arlene Sterne is a 20th-Century actress fascinated with 19th-Century women of the stage.

“I’d read a lot about these women, and I was struck by the similarities in their lives, their points of view, the parallels between them,” says Sterne, whose 1979 one-woman show, “Final Curtain,” had its West Coast premiere Thursday at the West End Playhouse. In the 85-minute piece, the veteran actress marks her Los Angeles theater debut by portraying stage legends Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse and Ellen Terry.

“They were each golden superstars of their time,” she says, “and each of them expressed a love-hate relationship with the stage.

“I think all of us in this profession experience that,” the Boston native adds dryly. “Also, each of them spoke of the ephemeral nature of theater. Painters and sculptors leave an enduring record of their achievements, but the stage actor--at least before you could tape a performance--leaves only a reputation.”

In Stern’s original, longer version, the subjects were Duse, Terry, Sarah Siddons and Fanny Kemble. “I wanted to write about Bernhardt, but I wasn’t sure she could share the spotlight,” explains the actress, who has performed the piece in England, Scotland and Canada. “And to be candid, I was a little intimidated.”

But during a 1982 European tour--as she imagined herself retracing the footsteps of her subjects--Sterne relented: “In Paris, I realized that Bernhardt really belonged in the play.”

The biographical research was already in place and by her next performance--at the Smithsonian in Washington in 1983--Bernhardt was in; Siddons and Kemble were soon eased out. In subsequent versions, the play has continued to evolve. Although she hadn’t performed the piece since 1990 (“I pretty much put it on the shelf”), six months ago, Sterne was asked to perform “Final Curtain” at the Yale School of Drama as a performance-workshop focusing on the writer’s creative process.

“As I began to go over the play, I made some remarkable discoveries,” says the actress, who credits New York vocal coach Elizabeth Dixon and dialect coaches Timothy Monich and Gemma Spinelli (who comes from the same province as Dusa) with helping her create three very distinctive--and historically correct--accents for her subjects.

“In earlier incarnations, Duse had been very one-dimensional; I’d left out some valuable aspects of her personality. So I had to go back to basics, reinvent the piece again.”

An earlier version of the show was taped in 1986, when it was produced for PBS by Joseph Janeti. The program played in 15 markets around the country, not including Los Angeles.

“At the time, I was trying to work with a series of one-person shows, so I was seeing everything that was being done,” Janeti recalls. “Arlene’s was one of the two or three best thought-out, quality shows. It really stood out. And Arlene herself is accessible, collaborative, experimental, really open to working with people.”

She’s also well-traveled. As the wife of the late diplomat Paul Bergman, Sterne spent much of her adult life on the road, variously living in Paris, Vienna, Austria, Ethiopia and Ottawa. For the past five years, she’s commuted between homes in New York and Los Angeles. During her years abroad, she also raised three children (her daughter is now an actress in New York) and worked as a broadcast journalist.

“It wasn’t easy,” Sterne admits of her life on the move. “I kept taking hiatuses from acting. But I kept coming back.”

WHERE AND WHEN

* Location: West End Playhouse, 7446 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys.

* Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays; indefinitely.

* Price: $12.50.

* Call: (818) 904-0444.