A ROMAN ROYALLY INTRIGUED BY ACTING

“In Rome, the attitude tends to be: ‘You’re a prince. Your family is rich. What do you want to be an actor for?’ I’m glad nobody asks me that here.”

Blond, blue-eyed Urbano Barberini is 6-foot-1 and 25 years old, the kind of effortlessly stylish Italian you see leaping in and out of speedboats on Capri or gracing the pages of fashionable European magazines. He can trace his family back to the days of the Roman Empire. It has given the world five Popes--and one of them, Urbano VIII, is the fellow who got Bernini to come up with most of his great sculptures.

Impressive stuff, you may think.

What does he think?

“The hell with all that,” says Urbano. “I’m more interested in acting.”

He’s already been in a few movies in Italy--one of them, “Demons,” recently opened here--and that’s fine as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. But now he’s getting a chance to show his stuff in a major work--he plays the young captain, Cassio, in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Otello,” based on Verdi’s opera, which opens here Sept. 26. And although the stars of the film are Placido Domingo and Katia Ricciarelli, the renegade prince will undoubtedly get his share of attention.

He’s been here in Los Angeles for a month--studying with Stella Adler, talking to producers, reading scripts and eating junk food, which he adores and which tends to bring him out in spots.

And he loves it all.

“It’s my first visit,” he said in fluent English, “and it’s been a great experience working with Adler. We have acting coaches in Italy, but there they’re not as dedicated as they are here. Now, what I must do is lose my accent.”

An Italian without his accent, you may think, is a sheep well and truly shorn. But with few movies now being made in Italy, Urbano is determined not to limit himself in any way.

“This is where I want to work now,” he said. “Here even small films have some chance, I think.”

Before he did his screen test for Zeffirelli, Urbano went to a singing teacher for private lessons. Then, after downing a couple of stiff Scotches, he turned up on the set.

“It was a difficult test because I had to sing in perfect sync to someone else’s voice,” he said. “I do sing, of course, but not well enough for Cassio. And there were 20 other actors there testing for the role--I didn’t expect that; it was a shock. I did my best but afterward I was sure I hadn’t got it. So I went after another film and got that. Then they told me I had Cassio.”

His family, of course--august, illustrious owner of vast tracts of land and a castle--still refuses to take his acting ambitions seriously.

“When I first decided to become an actor I didn’t even tell them about it,” he said. “I told them I was going away skiing for six weeks, and in that time I made a film. They were horrified when they saw it. Mind you, I was rather bad in it.

“My grandmother still hopes I’ll change my mind. When I was making ‘Otello’ on Crete, she called up and said, ‘What are you doing with those strange people? You must come home at once.’ ”

Urbano has seen “Otello” several times and feels good about it.

“People ask me if it feels strange to see myself up there singing with someone else’s voice (he is dubbed). But it’s such a good marriage between voice and character that I think it’s me singing when I see it.”

Cannon, which is releasing “Otello,” has signed him for a new movie to be made in Africa--”Gore,” directed by Fritz Kiersch.

“It’s a great chance,” he said. “Here I am, an Italian actor, getting the lead in an American film. It’s three months in Africa and then I’ll return here to study more with Stella Adler.

“And eat more junk food.”

Urbano loves it so much that he wrote furious letters to Rome newspapers when opposition developed to the opening of a McDonald’s not far from the Spanish steps.

“I thought it was great that young Italians could eat there for just 2,000 lire,” he said. “Most of the opposition came from rich people.”