CRITIC AT LARGE : HE’S PLAYING NICE GUYS AT LONG LAST

It was not his first film; he’d been a college pal of Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were,” had supported Jack Lemmon and Genevieve Bujold in “Alex and the Gypsy.” But it was his portrayal of Gregory Powell, one of the two killers in Joseph Wambaugh’s “The Onion Field,” that made James Woods an actor to remember.

He was intense, erratic, menacing, a grenade about to blow. As happens with superior performances, the actor (still relatively unfamiliar) had vanished before the character. But, afterward, it was the actor’s power that stayed in mind.

Woods’ skills and intensity have kept him busy. By his count he’s now done 75 plays, 18 films and 36 television parts (he was Meryl Streep’s husband in “Holocaust,” worked with Bette Davis and Faye Dunaway in “The Disappearance of Aimee”).

Three dozen of the plays were from his years at MIT, including summer stock. At MIT, Woods says, “There were 3,000 guys with Clearasil and slide rules in their hip pockets, and 14 girls,” but the MIT drama club could recruit women from other campuses or from town, and did. So, of romantic necessity an actor was born (although in fact he’d done “The Little Foxes” in high school in Rhode Island).

He is currently visible in the title role in the just-opened Mordecai Richler-Ted Kotcheff “Joshua Then and Now,” which like the earlier Richler novel-into-film “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” is also about growing up Jewish in Montreal and seems autobiographical in spirit if not in detail.

The role is a real enough landmark for Woods. He is not in support of anyone else (Alan Arkin is marvelous in support of him), and while as Joshua the successful writer he is a rough-cut diamond, arrogant and difficult, he is indubitably the sympathetic protagonist and not, for once, a case history of murderous pathology.

He had been a thoroughly nasty gang leader in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America,” a nasty nightclub owner in Taylor Hackford’s remake of “Out of the Night,” “Against All Odds” and expertly unpleasant in Wambaugh’s “The Black Marble.”

He has been so effectively bad, Woods says, that people occasionally say they remember him as a Nazi in “Holocaust,” when in fact he played a Jewish artist. “Talk about an image,” he says. It was clearly about time that he get to be a good guy again, although he adds that he has always picked parts for their goodness, not the characters’.

He had worked previously with Kotcheff in “Split Image,” a film that came and went too fast two seasons ago, about a family trying to retrieve a child from a cult. Woods played a deprogrammer.

“I told Ted, let’s make the guy as loathsome as possible, but a guy who gets the job done,” he says. That was the way it worked out, and Woods’ deprogrammer, rough-talking and impatient but brutally effective, became the dynamo that drove the film.

Woods will be seen Nov. 2 in a CBS movie, “Badge of the Assassin,” based on a true story of two New York City policemen, in which he plays the assistant district attorney who broke the case, another non-villainous role.

On the day after Christmas, “Salvador” opens. This is Oliver Stone’s film, built around the true story of a photojournalist named Richard Boyle covering the war in El Salvador. Woods plays Boyle, co-starring with John Savage as another journalist, both confronting the horror of the death squads.

Woods was an Army brat and a whiz kid, who had lived in four states and on Guam before he was 7. His family settled in Warwick, R.I., and he ended up in a gifted children’s program. He and 10 classmates from the program each won full college scholarships. Woods opted for MIT to study mathematics. (Unique among the actors I’ve ever met, he talks about Einstein’s unified field theory with the excitement others reserve for a new contract.)

He switched to political science when a kindly professor told him that most mathematicians were burned out by 28. The acting may have begun as a girl-finding lark, but by his senior year Woods phoned his mother that he was dropping out of MIT (despite dean’s-list grades) to become an actor. Whatever she felt, she wished him well and he hitchhiked to New York to find a career. Within two years he was in “Borstal Boy” and in 1970 won an Obie for “Saved.”

Even so, he says, “For a long, long time I felt like a fake as an actor, I guess because I hadn’t had to do it, hadn’t been driven to act, like some of my pals.”

Woods, who is divorced, has a house in the Hollywood hills, collects books and contemplates the mixed blessings of success. He is recognized now, which makes it tougher to keep in touch with everyday life, as he thinks a good, observant actor must.

“The more time you spend in limos, the less you know about what’s going on outside. How are you going to know what it feels like to be snarled at by a bank teller if he spots you and is all smiles?”

There are worse things than being snarl-free, as Woods acknowledges. But the larger problem of the cocooning effect of success is not imaginary, although recognizing the problem may be the beginning of the solution.

Meanwhile, having become a serious good guy, Woods muses about a next step, to comedy. “It would probably have to be a black comedy, but it would be a start.”