CURTAIN TO RISE ON LIGHTER SIDE OF NICOL WILLIAMSON

The sexpot who longs to be considered an intellectual; the rich man who likes to think money doesn’t figure in his popularity--it’s a curiosity of human nature that people daydream over the unlikelihood in themselves.

Take Nicol Williamson, for example. As a major actor in the English-speaking theater, he has done pitched battle with the “major” roles (“Hamlet,” “Macbeth”) and has played most notably in parts that require the demonic or the passionately possessed. In London, he created the role of Maitland in John Osborne’s “Inadmissible Evidence” and rode it to a Tony on Broadway. He makes his Los Angeles stage debut Monday at the Hollywood Playhouse in a vehicle of his own design that’s neither strictly legit--theatrically speaking--nor charged with fustian or smoldering intensity.

Instead, Williamson will appear on stage as himself, more or less, with a five-piece band in a program called “Nicol Williamson: An Evening With a Man and His Band,” a version of which he recalls as having been cited by Time magazine as one of the 10 best shows of the season when it was done in New York in 1980. Instead of the declarative Williamson, we’ll get a song-and-dance man, or at least a song-and-joke man (there’s a section dedicated to Lenny Bruce).

“The supreme irony of my life is that my metier is light comedy,” Williamson said recently during a rehearsal break. “People like to pigeonhole you. One of my first major roles was ‘Diary of a Madman.’ After that, people thought that’s what I am. When you play a part, you always mask yourself. But here I feel I have to be up front, as Prufrock would say, ‘pinned and wriggling on the wall.’

“If you want to know my motive for doing this, it’s that it’s a pleasure for me to give pleasure. Something has gone out of the theater today, when people putting together a production are mainly concerned about finance and success. Theater, to me, means first and foremost that you must entertain. What I want to do is allow people to sit back and loosen their ties and shoes, and enjoy.”

A publicist’s letter about the show lists, among others, Samuel Beckett, John Betjeman, Hoagy Carmichael, E.E. Cummings, Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Jerome Kern, Rudyard Kipling, Tom Lehrer, Shakespeare and Stevie Wonder as some of the artists whose works Williamson will perform. But he’s purposefully vague about who he’ll do or in what order or what the theme of the show is, beyond the catch-all phrase, “a kaleidoscope.”

“I don’t want it to be fixed in cement,” he said. “I’d like it to be where I can turn to one of the musicians and say ‘What was that? Where are we?’ ”

He said this after he’d stood up and taken a final pull from a bottle of Heineken. A shade under 6-foot-2, Williamson said, “People are always surprised to discover that I’m not short and stout.” But the expectation may come from the way he bores into roles like a short heavyweight boxer elbowing his opponent into the ropes. He has long arms and strong, expressive hands. Born and reared in Scotland, Williamson, 48, has the Scottish poet’s classic lean and rounded skull, which tapers into an underslung jaw that feeds an overall expression of Presbyterian indignation. His face is rimmed with fine blond hair that in certain light darkens to the color of dried blood.

The strain of dour Scottish idealism is apparent in his family background.

“My mother had a wonderful singing voice, which has been a great influence on me. She died tragically, which knocked my father off some--they’d been lovebirds. He had a plant of his own where he manufactured aluminum sticks for the British Steel Corp. When Margaret Thatcher killed off the BSC, he went to the wall for his workers. He could’ve been well off, but he plunged his life savings into keeping them on the payroll, hoping the BSC would reopen. It never did.

“I was sent to live with grandparents during the war. All that splitting up is ghastly. The good, solid family is the most solvent institution we have. If it splits up, the trauma stays with you forever. When a child asks, ‘Do you love me?’ that’s a mask for a sense of rejection.”

If Williamson experienced a particularly lonely and uncertain youth (he has a sister), he never had any doubt that the theater, or something like it, was where he wanted to be.

“My father expected me to be a metallurgist, but I wasn’t interested. I can never remember a time when I wanted to do anything else but be involved in the richness of language. And I was always around music. When I was 4, I hung around a piano player named Jimmy Duncan who played a wonderful version of ‘In the Mood.’ ‘Play it again, Jimmy,’ I’d say. I could listen to it forever.”

Williamson’s father never stood in his way--” ’Good luck,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here if you need me’ “--and the son went to college for speech training, then edged his way into the theater through the Dundee Repertory and the Cambridge Arts theaters. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, and with roles in “The Lower Depths,” “Waiting for Godot” and “The Ginger Man,” he rose to eminence (his film roles include “The Seven-Percent Solution,” “Excalibur,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can” and the upcoming “Black Widow”).

Williamson considers himself something of a free spirit who doesn’t work especially for money and stoutly resists being stuck in long runs. The variety and brevity of his own show is an example.

“It has rock, jazz, swing, rhythm and blues, comedy, poetry, verse, anecdote and chill--all constructed to run fluidly in two hours,” he says of a program that will not run for more than four weeks if he can help it.

Still, you wonder, what’s the cue for a “serious” actor offering an entertainment that risks being a trifle? Perhaps it’s in memory. Recalling the Jimmy Duncan days, Williamson said: “All the family were singers. No one watched TV. On Saturday nights people would get together and sing. The memory of it recalls summer and autumn nights, the sound of a lawn mower in the distance, people making their own entertainment, telling jokes and stories. I’d be sent to my room, but I’d creep to the top of the stairs to listen. I’m a great lover of life and energy.

“Life is all you’ve got, so stick a geranium in your hand and be happy.”