JAN NIKLAS AND HIS CZAR-ING ROLE IN ‘PETER’

In NBC’s “Peter the Great,” actor Jan Niklas commands an army.

But during six months in the Soviet Union filming the four-part miniseries (airing nightly through Wednesday at 9 p.m., Channels 4, 36 and 39), the soft-spoken German actor who plays the 17th-Century czar as a young man confronted a very different army.

“Every day at the same time, about 7 p.m., a whole army of ants marched into my hotel room, eating up the food I had flown in from Austria,” said the veteran of 40 films for European television.

“Finally, I asked the Soviet hotel manager to move me to another room. He stood up very tall and with a perfectly straight face declared, ‘These ants were brought in by the CIA to destroy our hotel,’ so from then on we called them ‘CIA ants,’ ” Niklas said with a chuckle.

The actor got a different room in the modern resort hotel. But that evening he found a new army of ants nibbling at his imported delicacies.

Niklas said that he willingly endured the ants, the hotel’s unreliable heating and the bitter cold on location in historic Suzdal--150 miles closer to the North Pole than Moscow--for the chance to appear in a major role in an American film because as a child he came to love Hollywood movies.

As a boy of 6 in post-war Munich, Niklas said, he often sneaked into a neighborhood movie theater that catered to GIs by playing Hollywood films.

His father, an actor who became a merchant after his career ran afoul of the Nazis and World War II, instilled his son with his own dream of finding success on stage and screen.

“My dream was to be in American films,” Niklas said, “and I decided years ago that I would never come to America as a tourist, only as a professional actor or not at all.”

Although Niklas stars in the first two nights--Sunday and tonight--of the $29.2-million miniseries, NBC did not bring him to Los Angeles for its promotion of the film. Instead, Niklas paid his own way and the network focused press attention on Oscar-winning actor Maximilian Schell, who plays the czar as a mature man and who reportedly was paid nine times Niklas’ $100,000 fee.

An NBC spokesman said the network “simply doesn’t have a budget to fly in every actor. There are only so many promotion dollars and we had to go with bigger names and higher visibility, like Schell and Omar Sharif.”

During filming, Niklas declined interviews, and only reluctantly did he agree to this one. “I do not like to advertise myself,” he said.

In “Peter the Great,” Niklas plays a bold character with command presence who leads Russia into the West’s Renaissance. But on a quiet Sunday afternoon in his hotel room here, the shy Niklas spoke in a voice so quiet that his words almost melted into the walls.

Niklas said that to remind himself “to play Peter, this timeless tornado, not as a period part but as a contemporary role in period costume. I wore my blue jeans and my Madonna T-shirt under my extraordinary Russian costumes with all their diamonds, pearls and furs.”

Niklas said he has never been without work--either in European television films or on the stage in Munich, Hamburg and Vienna--since he was graduated from the Max Reinhardt School in the early ‘70s. “I have been very fortunate that I’ve always had parts I liked very much, very complex characters. I know I would not like to play characters without any depth.”

His potential as an actor was noted by the first critic to review him, for a “silly part” in a sketch at an English boarding school. “Jan Niklas, A Name You Have To Remember,” read the headline in the provincial English newspaper.

To play the czar, Niklas said, he was tutored by a historian in Vienna and he read not only Peter K. Massie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, on which the miniseries is loosely based, but books by Soviet and European authors about the megalomaniacal ruler. “I stayed up reading many nights until I could see the sun, I was so fascinated with this strange man.

“To make a miniseries of this man’s whole life is really impossible, because you have to leave out so many whole chapters and what you do, really, is concentrate on a few headlines.

“Peter built the first Russian navy, but because of problems fitting scenes shot by two directors, you do not see hardly any ships in the miniseries and you do not see what a large country Russia is,” Niklas said.

The miniseries was created by producer Lawrence Schiller, who was ousted after seven weeks of filming in Austria because of fights with his line producer, whose job was to control finances. Marvin J. Chomsky, the triple Emmy-winning director, came in to continue production.

Previously, Niklas has had minor roles in several U.S. films made in Europe, including “Twenty-One Hours in Munich” for ABC, in which he played an aide to the late William Holden’s character.

Niklas, who is now enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute here, plays the antagonist in “Colonel Redl,” a West German production directed by Istvan Szabo, Hungary’s pre-eminent director, which is now showing in Los Angeles. Niklas plays Kristof Kubinyi, an upper-class youth who makes friends with Redl, a spy played by Klaus Maria Brandauer.