RODERICK MANN : WILLIAMSON IS WARY OF L.A. ‘LEGENDS’

“I’m being urged to move here,” said Nicol Williamson, sitting back in his Los Angeles hotel suite and sipping champagne. “My new agents seem to think it’s the right time; that I’d get good parts. But I don’t know.”

After the gala screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the other night of the CBS television movie “Passion Flower,” in which he stars with Bruce Boxleitner and Barbara Hershey, Williamson found himself being wined and wooed by a battery of William Morris agents, telling him all those encouraging things that agents tell their new clients.

It’s hardly surprising. For years now, in London and New York, Williamson has been turning in interesting performances. On stage he has triumphed in a grand slam of classic roles--”Hamlet,” “Coriolanus” and “Macbeth.”

“I suppose they’re interested in me here because I’m still something of a new face,” said the 47-year-old Scottish-born actor. “They know British actors like Sean (Connery) and Michael (Caine) but they haven’t seen much that I’ve done.”

The films that have been seen--among them “Excalibur,” “Robin and Marian” and “The Seven Percent Solution”--gave Williamson little chance to display his fiery talent. It was this talent that prompted Time magazine to call his performance in John Osborne’s “Inadmissible Evidence” “incandescent.” And it’s the chance that a little of that might transfer to the screen some day that has his agents after him with a net. But Williamson is being careful. He knows very well that, if he just comes here and hangs around, the welcome mat could soon become frayed. “So I’ve said I’ll happily come here to work, but not to live,” he said. “I’ll stay where I am.”

Which is where?

“Amsterdam. Terrific place. I love the Dutch.”

You speak Dutch?

“No.”

Then how do you get along?

“I get along.”

He plans to spend the holidays in Amsterdam, then return to the United States to do some further promotions for “Passion Flower” and also for his coming PBS miniseries, “Mountbatten; The Last Viceroy,” in which he plays the lead.

“People here are being so encouraging,” he said with a chuckle. “I can hardly wait to come back.”

MONEY FIRST: “A percentage?” said Jackie Gleason, looking horrified. “Not a chance. I never take a percentage of a movie. People say I’m crazy, that I could have made a fortune from ‘Smokey and the Bandit.’ But I like cash on the table. So I took cash for this.”

“This” is Tri-Star’s “Nothing in Common,” directed by Garry Marshall, in which Gleason plays a man about to be divorced after 34 years. Eva Marie Saint plays his wife; Tom Hanks, their son.

He’s enjoying it. “Particularly as I didn’t have to write any of my own lines,” he said, “In the past, I’ve done that often. Had to. On ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ everyone said: Burt Reynolds and Jackie Gleason--what great chemistry! But we didn’t have a single scene together until I wrote one.”

Gleason clearly finds acting easy.

“Well, it is,” he said. “I don’t know why people make such a big deal of it. If you’ve got the talent, you’ve got it; if you haven’t, you haven’t. And it’s a helluva lot easier than being funny, I promise you.”

NEW BOOK: Terry O’Neill, considered by many as one of the world’s five top photographers, was here this week for the publication of his coffee-table volume, “Legends,” in which he’s captured almost all the Hollywood greats in off-guard moments.

He’s also been discussing some possible movie projects. Plans for him to direct his wife, Faye Dunaway, in “Duet for One” foundered a while back. Now, he’s talking about directing her in a remake of the classic newspaper movie, “The Sweet Smell of Success.” He wants Dunaway to play the old Burt Lancaster role as the columnist and Madonna to be the press agent (played in the original by Tony Curtis).

“I think it would be sensational” O’Neill said.

TIME WILL TELL: British actor Charles Dance, who was seen with Meryl Streep in “Plenty,” has a major role in “Out on a Limb”--the miniseries based on Shirley MacLaine’s autobiography. He will play Gerry, the British politician with whom she claims to have had an affair.

After working with Streep, he said, “I didn’t get to know her well enough to say whether I liked her or not.” We shall have to wait a while to hear what he has to say about MacLaine.