WRITERS GUILD BOWS IN ROBERT BOLT’S DIRECTION

Six years ago Robert Bolt underwent open heart surgery here in Los Angeles. A few hours after the operation he suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to speak or to move for two years.

But, thanks to “some lovely nurses,” the constant but hard-line encouragement of his wife, Sarah Miles, and his own stubborn determination, Bolt is back on active duty.

“You made up your mind to fight. You willed it,” Miles said at breakfast in their suite at a hotel in Beverly Hills earlier this week.

“Now, now, now,” Bolt said fondly. He sails his own boat from their home on the Thames at Hammersmith, drives a car and wrote the screenplay for the large-scale but intimate historical epic “The Mission,” which opens next week.

Tonight Bolt, who won Academy Awards for his scripts for “Doctor Zhivago” in 1965 and “A Man for All Seasons” (based on his play) in 1966, is being honored by the Writers Guild of America for his achievements.

An invited audience at the Motion Picture Academy’s Goldwyn Theater will see clips from his films, which also include “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Ryan’s Daughter” and “Lady Caroline Lamb.” The evening will conclude with a screening of “The Mission.”

The tribute to Bolt is the first of its kind the guild has ever paid. As a member of the British Writers Guild, Bolt has never been eligible for the American Guild’s own annual awards. The present honor can be seen as a gesture of an admiration long felt but never formally acknowledged.

“It’s a lovely thing the guild is doing,” Bolt said over tea and English muffins.

“He’s improving by leaps and streaks,” Miles says. “He walks faster, his speech is clearer.” The intelligence is sharp, agile and witty as ever; the words form patiently, one by one. Like Lyndon Johnson, he proudly displays a road map of white surgical scars on his chest, a survivor’s monogram.

“I didn’t know how sick I was,” Bolt says. “Thank God I didn’t. I don’t blame those who turn their face to the wall when something like this happens. If you’re alone, not enough money, no friends, it must be appalling. No one can know who hasn’t been through it, and that’s the only time I’ve said that in my life.”

He will finish another book in December, subject undisclosed although it is not, Bolt says, about his illness. “Who’d want to read a book about that?” he asks dismissively, although there are those who might well find hope and encouragement in the way Bolt has sprung back from the months during which he was, in his own word, a vegetable.

He writes mornings on a word processor. (“Bless it; I wouldn’t go back to the typewriter any more than I would to the quill.”)

He had visited the Guarani Falls, where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet and where “The Mission” is set, nearly eight years ago at the urging of Fernando Ghia, the film’s co-producer (with David Puttnam).

“He’d given me some background about the Jesuit missions there, and I’d said, ‘It sounds like a play, except I don’t know how you’d keep it to two hours.’ Then I saw the falls--three times the size of Niagara, you know--and I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do a film about them, haven’t we?”

Bolt had written a first draft before his stroke. The second and third drafts, considerably changed, he wrote after the stroke.

It was the contrast between the majesty of the Guarani Falls and the timeless and ongoing plight of the Indians that inspired Bolt to write “The Mission.”

“There are perhaps 3,000 of the Guarani left. Half a million of them were wiped out when the missions fell. The thing that I remember most about the visit there are the indigenous tribes. They’re still being wiped out of existence, but now it’s by progress, so-called, by the likes of British Petroleum.

“It still goes on; if it didn’t, I wouldn’t bother to write a film about it. You need events at a little distance in time from the audience, to have the perspective that gives the events shape, form and meaning for the audience. Why didn’t Shakespeare write about his own time in London. He said things about it, but from history.”

He had first worked with Fernando Ghia in 1970, doing an uncredited and unavailing rescue rewrite on “The Red Tent,” which Ghia was producing with Franco Cristaldi. Ghia then produced “Lady Caroline Lamb,” which starred Miles and which was Bolt’s first and last outing as a director. “Never again,” he says of the experience.

Bolt and Miles were divorced several years ago but have been reunited by his adversity. She remembers the “Lamb” experience with amusement. “Robert would be going over the line readings with the actors, and Ossie (Oswald) Morris, the cinematographer, would come up and say, ‘Now about the camera placement for the next shot . . . ‘ and Robert would say, ‘Go away, go away.’ ”

Some crucial exposition in the film took place at a formal dinner party. Miles wore a spectacular although historically quite accurate dress, Empire-style from the continent, with the rouged bosoms exposed, a fashion Lady Caroline is understood to have brought into England. “Rather a saucy dress, but beautiful,” she says. It was later pointed out that the scene would earn the film an X certificate, as limiting at the box office as an X rating here, and therefore unacceptable.

“But stubborn you,” Miles said to Bolt, laughing, “you wouldn’t reshoot the scene; you just took it out. It made the meaning of the film a bit of a puzzle.”

“Now, now, now,” Bolt said.