ACTOR RAY McANALLY IS FULFILLING HIS ‘MISSION’

The memorable last images of “The Mission,” the more startling because they suddenly appear after the long closing credits, are of Ray McAnally as Cardinal Altamirano, the Vatican’s emissary to the Jesuit missions in South America, staring into the camera.

“It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s not just entertainment, is it?’ ” McAnally remarked during a visit to Los Angeles a few days ago.

“An interviewer in England,” McAnally added, “asked me what I was actually thinking during that shot. Well now, it’s not the kind of thing you can put into words, is it? I mean, your thoughts don’t necessarily take the form of words. They’re nods leading to a proposition, possibly, accents and dissents from vague consents. ‘Umm,’ you’re saying to yourself, ‘Hmm.’

“Surely the look is enough. But I had to answer something, so I said I was beaming out to the audience my agent’s name and number.”

Although he has done more than 200 films and television shows and worked with Gary Cooper (“The Naked Edge”), James Cagney (“Shake Hands With the Devil”), Robert Ryan (“Billy Budd”) and many another American star, McAnally has what you could call the persisting and sought-for unfamiliarity of the true actor who would rather be believed than recognized.

A photographer who had seen “The Mission” confessed that she didn’t remember what part McAnally had played, and could he refresh her memory? It was a compliment, tinged with irony. In truth the man she was photographing looked little like a cardinal. He wore a gingery toothbrush mustache and a rumpled suit and could have passed as a Dublin barman visiting relatives in the States.

McAnally had grown the mustache for his role in a seven-hour miniseries of John le Carre’s “A Perfect Spy,” in which he plays Rick Pym, the extravagant, domineering con man father of Magnus Pym, the perfect spy who is the book’s narrator. Two episodes are done; shooting concludes in March.

“I age from 25 to 75; it’s a grand part,” he says. McAnally has also lately finished shooting “The Fourth Protocol” with Michael Caine in Finland. In that one, he is the head of the KGB.

McAnally was born in the seaside village of Buncrana (pop. 1,000) in Donegal and says he has been giving performances since he was 6. “Traveling companies would come to town and set up a stage. I’d do kids’ parts for them.”

Then again, his whole life occasionally seems like a performance, and to speak of his gift of gab is like calling Versailles a house.

He commenced at St. Eunan’s College and then spent three years studying for the priesthood before he decided that he had a vocation, although that was not it.

“But I did understand that acting was a vocation, as distinct from a profession, and it needed discipline, work, study, the ability to read.” He emerged from St. Patrick’s College with a degree in literature, language and philosophy and, in 1947 at 21, joined the famous Abbey Theatre Company, of which he remains a permanent member.

He has also sung with a dance band (four years in his youth), done radio and television commentaries on snooker, pool and golf, worked with elephants in a circus and been straight man for a dog act, and appeared in cabaret. This in addition to 250 plays and the 200 or so television dramas and feature films.

After all of it, he admits, “The Mission” is the first of his roles to make the headlines. “And it’s welcome,” he says with a smile bordering on the sly, “to make the headlines with a good part.”

In 1963 McAnally went on leave as a full-time Abbey player. “They were beginning to say, ‘McAnally’s competent. He can handle it.’ I realized it was time I tried being a small fish in a big pond.”

He went to London, and there was determined to accept anything except Irish parts. “I’d known too many Irish actors who went to London and got stuck doing nothing but Irish parts, of which there are never enough. I did Germans, Russians, Americans, Spaniards, lots of Spaniards, but no Irish.”

He played George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in London for 18 months.” He had returned to the Abbey intermittently and in 1980 went back for three full-time years of acting and directing.

His wife is an actress and three of their four children, although never pushed to go into, have gravitated toward careers in the profession. “We’re the McAnally Mafia,” he says. Son Conor is a director whose independent production company, Green Apple, turns out 11 hours of television, including game shows, every week. Another son is a musician; one daughter did stunt work on “The Mission” and is a trainee director. A second daughter is a computer programmer.

“I’ve been in flops, but I’ve never been in a show I was ashamed of,” McAnally says. “But without getting toffee-nosed about it, ‘The Mission’ was in a class by itself with anything I’ve done. At the end of a day you’d know you’d done something worthwhile. But at that I didn’t realize how much it’d meant to me. Lately I told my son, ‘When I die, Irish Television will call. Tell ‘em to put on ‘The Mission.’ ”