JOE SENECA ARRIVES AT HIS MOMENT OF TRUTH

Joe Seneca has spent his entire career on the fringe of the spotlight.

He won’t give out his age (“Let ‘em think about it some,” he says). But the deep lines in his hands and his powdery white beard are a dead giveaway. This is a man who’s been around long enough to travel the chitlin circuit with Pearl Bailey and play the jukebox at Count Basie’s on 7th Avenue.

A musician/songwriter-turned-actor, Seneca’s also old enough to have once performed with Billie Holiday and to have written a Little Willie John hit (“Talk to Me”) that was an R&B; standard nearly 30 years ago.

Now, after more than a decade of honing his acting skills, Seneca has finally reached center stage. He’s just landed the biggest role of his career, playing an aging, irascible blues man in the new Walter Hill film “Crossroads,” a portrayal that has won accolades from critics across the country.

Apparently well into his 50s, Seneca took great relish in calculating the precise moment when he’d graduated to celebrity status.

“I had a part in ‘The Verdict,’ and right after it came out, I was standing in line somewhere when a young black woman came up to me, obviously checking me out. Someone else had already recognized me, but by the time it got down the line to her, my stature had increased considerably.

“She asked, ‘Are you really a movie star?’ I said I was really just another actor. But she came right up, opened her eyes real wide and said, ‘Come on! Where’s your jewelry!’ ”

Seneca laughed. “See, to some people the sense of accomplishment is all a matter of cars or suits. I hear a lot of people say, ‘Boy, you’re gonna really live it up now, aren’t you?’

“Of course, what they’re really saying is that’s the way they’d react if it was happening to them.”

A warm, gracious man with a wry sense of humor, Seneca has taken his new-found recognition in stride. “I just say, ‘I’ve always been rich and talented. It just so happened that I didn’t have any money or a place to stay.’

“I’ve had some hard times. I’ve slept on park benches, on the floors of people’s homes. But I’ve always been able to walk out the door and feel rich and talented again.”

In “Crossroads,” where Willie (Blind Boy Fulton) Brown teaches the blues to an aspiring young guitarist played by Ralph Macchio, Seneca’s character has all the grumpy authenticity of such real-life blues legends as Howlin’ Wolf or Lightnin’ Hopkins. Yet Seneca, who was born in Cleveland, is more at home with jazz and soulful ballads.

“I’ve heard blues all my life, but when you’ve been around something that long--I mean, people used to sing it in my neighborhood--I don’t think you have the same kind of passion for it. You can enjoy it or you can walk.”

But Seneca does identify with the gypsylike life style of traveling musicians. He left home at 20, forming a satirical nightclub act called the Three Riffs. Doing skits, scat routines and caricatures of pop stars of the era, the group ranged far and wide, doing Louis Armstrong impressions at the Village Vanguard and playing with Peg Leg Bates at the Plantation Club in Atlantic City.

“We’d go wherever we could get a gig,” he recalled, eating breakfast and enjoying the view from his Beverly Hills hotel suite. “You’d carry your home in your hand. I never could work at a real job, at least until I got so hungry that I’d get some work as a busboy or something to make ends meet.”

When the act broke up in the mid-’50s, Seneca turned to songwriting, writing tunes for everyone from Dean Martin to Brenda Lee. Later, when that well ran dry, he broke into acting, playing Danny Glover’s father in “Silverado” and Cutler, the bandleader in the play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

The latter performance won him the part in “Crossroads,” though Seneca noted that he’s brought a wealth of backstage remembrances to the role.

“I’ve been out on the circuit, so I used a lot of the stuff I’d picked up along the way,” he explained. “There’s a little bit of Big Joe Turner in Willie--the earthy, loose parts. But there’s also a lot of my Uncle Jimmy there too. He was my favorite--a tough, loud kind of guy, but very loving to his family. In fact, when he wasn’t up, shouting around, we’d think something was wrong.

“It’s as if I took the Willie Brown character and superimposed it over situations that were close to me, that had come from my heart and my circumstances in life.”

Seneca spent a month on location in Mississippi shooting the film. It was his first trip South in many years, and a fruitful one. But he admitted he wasn’t able to shake off the bitter memories from his youth.

“Back in the ‘50s, I’d bought this old car for $90 and my wife and I drove back from California on Route 66. And all through the South, there was only one place where we could stay. Everywhere else, people said their place was filled, even if it had cobwebs on it.

“I remember going into one place to get a sandwich and this guy told me to take my hat off. And I said, ‘But you’ve got your hat on.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care who’s got their . . . , “ and he went to reach for his gun.”

Seneca shrugged. “I just tipped my hat and got out of there.”

The actor fell silent, as if he were trying to slide that memory far back in his head. “When you have some of that in your background, you never really can relax,” he finally said. “I still didn’t know whether everyone would’ve been as nice if I wasn’t there with a movie.”

When his recollections returned to “Crossroads,” Seneca’s spirits revived. He saw it as a good omen that the film makers discarded a different possible ending for the film, where the story didn’t conclude on such an optimistic note.

“I was in New York when (director) Walter (Hill) called me up and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come back out here and die,’ ” Seneca recalled, impishly raising his eyebrows. “In that version, they had me dead, laid out in church in a pine box.

“I told Walter, ‘Couldn’t you just close up the coffin? Then I wouldn’t have to fly all the way back out.’ But they needed to see me, so we shot it. But I told them that I wasn’t getting in that box till the cameras were rolling.

“Ralph (Macchio) was pretty funny about it. He said, ‘Look at it this way: At least you don’t have any lines to remember.’ ”

Seneca wagged his head. “It definitely felt better to finish the film alive. You know, for me, it used to be that when a show finished, it was over. But after this movie, I feel like maybe it’s just beginning.”