From `Manhattan' to `42nd Street'

YOU MUST remember this. Halfway into Manhattan Woody Allen and Diana Keaton are mooching around an uptown clothes store when a short bald guy catches Keaton's attention. She stops, stunned. It's Jeremiah, her ex-husband. They exchange affectionat e "Hi"s, Keaton does some introductions, while Jeremiah explains that he's in town "for a symposium on semantics" (the delighted caw of emphasis he gives to this last word is priceless). More small-talk follows, of the "You're-looking-fabulous" variety.

When Jeremiah eventually withdraws, Allen, who has been looking on, expresses quiet amazement that the ladies' man Keaton always talked of, the man who "opened her up sexually", turns out to be "this little homunculus".

It's a good sight gag - Allen's imagined rival is even shorter than he is - but it's a great cameo. In less than two minutes' screen time Wallace Shawn as Jeremiah radiates a charisma so overwhelming that, for all his diminutive stature, you see that he might just be dynamite in the bedroom. In the 15 years since Manhattan we haven't seen enough of him. He had a starring part in Louis Malle's duologue My Dinner With Andre (1981) and a substantial role as the morbid gossip columnist Oiseau in The Moderns(1988), Alan Rudolph's languid pipe-dream of Paris in the Twenties. He was a villainous gargoyle in Rob Reiner's fairytale The Princess Bride (1987); did a fantastically funny turn as a Catholic priest terrifying the life out of Catholic Boys (1985); was a badgering attorney in The Bedroom Window (1987); and Orton's biographer in Prick Up Your Ears (1987). 1987 was evidently a busy year for him but after that you have to start scouting for parts. Not that he should worry, for, as any off-Broadway aficionado will know, Shawn has enjoyed a successful parallel career as a dramatist. "I was always more interested in writing," he says, "I just fell into acting. It was never an idea I had for myself."

Born in New York in 1943, Shawn spent the early part of his adult life as a schoolteacher, the only "proper" job he ever did. He doesn't count the months of drear toil operating the Xerox machine in a little store off Sixth Avenue. "It wasn't a job in which I planned any great progress." No need to trace his literary roots: his father was William Shawn, the long-serving former editor of the New Yorker.

Was he ever tempted to follow him into journalism? "The idea crossed my mind," he says, haltingly. "But I didn't particularly want to . . . he had an ability to devote his life to others. I felt that doing your own writing was more fulfilling." So how did he support himself in the early years? "Well, I borrowed money from friends! And felt no guilt about it either, you'll be horrified to hear. I wanted to spend my time writing. I was, I am, very stubborn, and I believed in myself as a writer." The fruit s of this determination are evidenced in what he calls "these strange plays", several of which came to London. He staged A Thought in Three Parts at the ICA in 1977; Marie and Bruce at the Royal Court in 1979; Aunt Dan and Lemon, also at the Court, in 19

85; and a one-man show, The Fever, at the Cottesloe in 1991.

While acting in a much-lauded off-Broadway production of Machiavelli's The Mandrake in the late 1970s he caught the eye of Juliet Taylor, Woody Allen's casting director, who invited him to try for a part in Manhattan. "[Allen's] meetings are famously brief," says Shawn. "You don't audition, you don't read. All he said to me was: `Are you gonna be in New York this summer?' The next thing I knew I was in the movie." It was said in some quarters that, after his performance in My Dinner With Andre, Shawn could have become the Woody Allen of the Eighties. It didn't happen, though that doesn't appear to have upset him. "Of course I'd rather play bigger parts, I had ambition like any actor. But there aren't all that many roles I could be cast for - I wouldn'teven cast myself in them. You get so many films now about gangsters . . . I don't have the `real feeling of the streets', and when you can get Joe Pesci to play them, why hire me?"

That Shawn is one of the most under-rated of American actors will be evident from Vanya on 42nd Street, in which Louis Malle, recovering from Damage, filmed a rehearsal of Chekhov's Uncle Van-ya (directed by Andre Gregory) in a derelict Broadway theatre.As Vanya, Shawn is a revelation: not the maundering old goat of traditional productions but a vivid romantic hero, thwarted in his love for Yelena (Julianne Moore, also magnificent) and angered by years of ill-use at the hands of Yelena's pompou s, elderly husband. Here, at last, is a role worthy of Shawn's sly, compacted energy. The film started life as a low-key rehearsal. "We never staged Vanya at all," he says. "A few of us started rehearsing it in 1990, just for the purpose of `exploring' t he play, as actors would say. After a couple of years of this we started inviting friends and we'd do the play differently each time. But we never made a production out of it." Malle subtly blurs the line between filmed record and theatrical performance, and, pressed into a ringside close up, we are granted an extraordinary sense of intimacy. It's an acting triumph, but don't expect Wallace Shawn, Leading Man, just yet. As he explains: "The life of an American actor isn't very satisfying. If you're a fa ilureit's a constant humiliation. If you're successful you get to do constant trash. It's a shame, but with very rare exceptions, American movies are revolting. Once or twice a year, maybe, a good film squeaks through the Hollywood system." Fortunately for us, Vanya is one such exception.