‘NIGHT OF THE IGUANA’: THE PLAY AS PICK-ME-UP

On Tuesday Eileen Brennan opens in Baltimore in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ play “The Night of the Iguana,” starring alongside Jeanne Moreau, Michael Moriarty and Roy Dotrice.

The play then moves to New York, opening on Broadway Nov. 21 and marking Brennan’s first return to the Great White Way in 20 years.

“Nervous?” she said, sitting over coffee at the kitchen table of her Studio City home just before she left. “Of course I’m nervous. But excited too. I’ve never seen the play--only the film (which starred Ava Gardner in the role Brennan will play--Maxine). That was a long time ago (1964) but I loved it.”

She hopes that the chance to star on Broadway will end her three-year battle to return to normalcy following the 1982 accident in which she was run down by a motorist in Venice, Calif. Her legs were crushed, her skull and facial bones fractured and one eye socket shattered. Now, thanks to plastic surgery, Brennan at 50 looks so good that friends keep pestering her for the name of her doctor.

If her accident was well documented, so was her visit last year to the Betty Ford clinic to kick her dependency on the drugs she had been taking for pain. Now she wants to speak of other things.

“I talked at length about everything that had happened because I felt if I was honest, I could help other people,” she said. “I hope I did. But now that’s all in the past.”

The play clearly dominates her thinking at the moment. But she is enthusiastic too about her new film “Clue”--based on the board game--in which she, Lesley Ann Warren, Madeline Kahn, Tim Curry and others romp through a “humdinger of a whodunit.”

“After all the misery I’ve been through, to be involved in a clever ensemble piece like that was just what I needed,” she said. “Now along comes this marvelous play.”

As an actress with a considerable body of work in the New York theater--including “Little Mary Sunshine” and “Hello, Dolly!”--Brennan knows full well the hazards of opening a play, even a star-studded revival, on Broadway.

So she’s crossing her fingers.

“But I’ve already bought myself a small apartment in Manhattan and I’m putting my sons (Sam, 14; Patrick, 12) in school in the East,” she said. “That’ll show you how optimistic I am.”

RIGHT PLACE: Chris Sarandon earned some of the best notices of his career for the vampire thriller “Fright Night.” “Sarandon is terrific as the vampire,” noted Variety--and that made the 43-year-old actor’s day. And night. He’d waited a long time to read that kind of review--since, in fact, he played Al Pacino’s lover in “Dog Day Afternoon” 11 years ago.

He’s made a lot of other movies since then, but he’s always kept his base in New York.

“I felt I should be able to live there and still have a movie career,” he said the other day. “But now my manager and my agent are urging me to spend more time out here. Maybe they’re right. After all, I got my role in Peckinpah’s picture ‘The Osterman Weekend’ because I happened to be here in Los Angeles while they were looking for someone. So maybe it would be a good idea to get a place here. . . .”

PESSIMISTIC: Ken Russell, the enfant terrible of British film directors, whose last movie here, “Crimes of Passion” with Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins, was a flop, says he’s pessimistic about his chances of filming in Britain in the future.

“There is a general feeling that I’m an undesirable alien. I’ve thought about why it should be so, but I can’t fathom it out. I suppose it’s just that everyone else is wrong and I am right.”

Russell, who now spends much of his time at his home in England, has become a keen gardener.

“The worst thing in my life used to be critics. Now it’s weeds. Come to think of it, there’s not much difference.”