Mortuary life isn’t the end-all

FRANCES CONROY and her husband are building a compound. In Echo Park.

If truth dwells in the details, this alone may be enough information.

Conroy is an Emmy-nominated actress just emerging from the final season of a hit TV show, an actress with one film out (“Broken Flowers”) and one about to begin shooting (“The Wicker Man”). She has won a Golden Globe and an Obie and been nominated for a Tony. That she would buy the property adjacent to hers and fix up the house for purposes other than renting it is not unusual. This is how many celebrities invest their money, protect their privacy and ensure that friends and family always have a place to stay when the Four Seasons is booked.

But in most cases, “compound” is preceded by “Malibu” or “Brentwood.” An Echo Park compound sounds vaguely like a training ground for gangbangers. And indeed, Conroy has had to cope with the neighborhood’s tagger element. She came home one night to find graffiti on their garage door and was not sure quite how to proceed -- she wanted to take it off “because if you don’t, then you’ve got the competitive graffiti problem” -- but she didn’t want to offend anyone involved in gang activity.

She called the police, who advised her to remove it, and quickly. “So there I am, out sanding my garage doors, looking over my shoulder like a complete insane person,” she says, laughing. “But it’s real, at least. Real life. Real city life.”

Conroy is hanging on to real for dear life. A successful stage actress for many years, she is now officially famous. In her Emmy-nominated performance as Ruth Fisher, the highly complicated matriarch of Alan Ball’s “Six Feet Under,” Conroy inhabited a character unlike any other. With her worn widow’s face and white anklets, Ruth is one of the few female television characters older than 50 who is sexually active on a regular basis with men to whom she isn’t married. Prickly and mercurial, she is still a good mother, or at least one who realizes that, as irritating as it may be, love does not look anything like what the storybooks say it will.

A real person, in other words.

So it is something approaching ironic that the popularity of the show -- which prides itself on presenting people as they actually are -- has pushed Conroy into the realm of the surreal. She finds herself approached in the grocery store, the subway, on the street by people who seem to know her, who clearly have certain expectations of her. People who “just love” Ruth. This is both gratifying -- she’s glad people watch the show, are moved by the show -- and unsettling.

“I love being in ‘Six Feet Under,’ ” she said in an interview a week before the show’s final episode aired. “Though I would like to get on a train without people having a seizure. But there are so many things about the industry,” she added, “that make it just divorced from reality.”

Far from the Westside scene

CONROY prefers reality. With her wild red hair and pale, fine features, she is prettier, and younger, than Ruth, but there is some of the same quiet ferocity. Just as Ruth couldn’t hang with her long-overdue makeover, Conroy is not movin’ on up to the Westside anytime soon. She not only lives in Echo Park, she works out at the downtown Y and regularly dines in Little Tokyo. She doesn’t have a personal publicist, and it shows -- she has a tendency to frown when she’s listening or speaking with emphasis. Clearly no one has coached her on the art of that wrinkle-preventing blank smile perfected by the cast of “Desperate Housewives” (apologies to Felicity Huffman).

Still, she was gratified when, for example, her sister mentioned how pretty she looked in “Broken Flowers,” in which she plays one of the ex-girlfriends visited by Bill Murray’s aging Lothario. “Although [my sister] also said there was a sadness to the scene,” she said. “Which is strange because I didn’t think of it as sad, only awkward.”

Working with Murray gave her a taste of what it’s like to be truly, madly, deeply famous. Their scenes together were shot in a weekend at a house in New Jersey. “The couple who owned it was still there, and they were so nice. Outside people were just standing for hours waiting to see Bill. Cops would be handing Bill things to autograph. Sometimes Bill would joke, say, ‘Didn’t I already do one for you?’ but he was really nice, very patient. Still, it was strange.”

Conroy came to live in Los Angeles quite accidentally. Over the years, she has appeared in many films (including, recently, a great turn as Katharine Hepburn’s mother in “The Aviator”), but much of her work has been on the New York stage, where she was a favorite of Arthur Miller’s. Back in the ‘80s, she was down at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre when she decided to buzz up to Los Angeles to see what all the fuss was about. She fell in with a group of folks working in the L.A. theater scene, including Jan Monroe, an actor and playwright, and Tony Abatemarco.

She liked L.A., and she really liked Monroe, so she hung out for a while working when and where she could, including a stint waitressing at Millie’s on Sunset.

Eventually she went back to New York for work and to care for her ailing mother, but still she kept an apartment here and visited Monroe when she could. Finally, she said, she looked at him and said, “Something is obviously going on.”

They were married at City Hall in New York in 1992 and returned to Los Angeles just in time to watch the city explode in post-Rodney King-verdict riots. “For our wedding party, we sat on the roof and watched the fires,” she says, shaking her head and frowning.

The two lived the bicoastal actor life for a while until, when starring in a Broadway production of “The Ride Down Mt. Morgan” (for which she received a 2000 Tony nomination), she got a call from Alan Ball, who wanted her to audition.

She showed up in a skirt, white anklets and pink shoes. Ball was so taken with the shoes that when he called her back, she debated whether she should wear them. “I didn’t, and when I got there he said, ‘Oh, you’re not wearing those great shoes,’ and I said, ‘I knew that if you cast me because of my shoes, we were all in big trouble.’ But I do think that’s why he had Ruth wear those white anklets.”

A challenging assignment

IT has not been an easy role to play, particularly during the last season. “We were taking Ruth to places where you really don’t want to go,” she says. “Sometimes I would sit there and think, ‘Oh, I can’t do this.’ ”

It didn’t help that the cast and crew was sworn to secrecy -- she couldn’t even talk with Monroe about what was happening. To minimize the emotional wear and tear, Conroy would put off reading the next episode’s script for as long as possible.

“I just didn’t want to know,” she says. “Like I didn’t know Nate was going to die until right before we were shooting it, and that helped. Because no matter what you do, that kind of knowledge is going to hang over you.”

And as off-putting as the encounters in the grocery stores may be, she is heartened, as an actress, by the popularity of the show, which steadfastly flew in the face of conventional TV wisdom.

“All these people just relate to the characters,” she says. “What intrigues me is how people watch it in groups, these tribal groups, which just shows the human desire to congregate, eat something and talk about drama.”

She is looking forward to the Emmys and to her role in the remake of “The Wicker Man,” but she doesn’t see herself taking advantage of the nomination to jump on some Hollywood fast track.

“People keep saying, ‘What are you doing next? What are you doing now?’ ” she says peevishly. “They’re so anxious that I should be doing something. I’m taking a deep breath. I think it’s important to take a deep breath once in a while.”

She is also caught up in working on her Echo Park “compound.” “We’ve torn out all the walls in [the new house] and just created a space. It’s very liberating,” says Conroy with a radiant smile, “the way light works without any walls in the way.”