ROY MARSDEN STARS : HELLO TO A TOUGH NEW ‘MR. CHIPS’ FROM BBC-TV

Robert Donat played Mr. Chips romantic in 1939. Peter O’Toole played him fey in 1969. In 1987, Roy Marsden plays Chips “tough.”

The BBC’s version of James Hilton’s classic 1934 story, airing in three parts on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” starting Jan. 4, employs the actor best known to Americans as the dour detective Chief Inspector Dalgliesh, who unravels P. D. James’ puzzles on “Mystery!”

Marsden, austere and forbidding in appearance, reveals himself to be warm and engaging when run to ground in a left-wing bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road. Over lunch at a greasy spoon around the corner, he explains how he made Mr. Chips a man of the people instead of merely a rich boys’ baby sitter.

“Earlier filmed versions of the story didn’t stick so closely to the book as the BBC did--the O’Toole version was a musical bastardization; Donat’s interpretation, while excellent overall, led to a degree of sentimentality. I made Chips more ordinary. As I played him, he was harsh at times. Tough.”

It would be odd if Marsden’s Chips weren’t harsh at times, and sentimentality would be right out. Marsden’s Chips aims to teach the sons of privilege that England’s place in the world isn’t necessarily to conquer and rule.

“The story is an appraisal of the end of empire,” Marsden says. “Chips’ world changes from a very cozy imperial state, with the pomp of the Victorian period, to the post-World War I world in which Britain was no longer the leader--industrially, economically and morally--of the world.

“It’s interesting to see that change through the eyes of a very ordinary schoolteacher working in the very privileged world of an English public school. You have to approach it from a political point of view.”

Marsden was a little surprised to find that although the world is much changed since Chips’ day, English public schools seem much the same. “We filmed at Repton, one of the most powerful established schools. We used the boys and dressed them in the uniforms of the period. We had hundreds of boys lined up to get period haircuts, like recruits at boot camp.”

Despite the differing sartorial and tonsorial details, Marsden found that “Repton’s world hasn’t really changed since the end of the last century. There are no newspapers, and television is allowed only on Saturday night. The training in class is the same--I played scenes in which I was teaching them Latin and the boys threw out the answers in Latin automatically.”

In America, high school movies make heroes of the classroom cutups. In England they make heroes of the teachers. PBS viewers will be relieved that there will always be an England, as long as the nation’s costume warehouses remain standing.

“You Americans see a film like ‘Room With a View’ as expressing England as it is, not as a fantasy of a bygone world,” Marsden continues.

“Americans’ interest in the period often covered in ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ productions gives us in Britain a chance to draw on material like the fight between the emerging working class and the old classes. We can present that world without repeating the worst stereotypes.”

In his quest to avoid stereotypes and play Chips unsentimentally, Marsden found out that Hilton had based the character on his own father, a teacher. “I then discovered that my uncle, who is in his 90s, knew James Hilton and as a boy used to go to his house. Consequently, my uncle knew the original Mr. Chips and told me that the book tied up directly with the man and was to a degree truthful.”

In a way, it isn’t such a leap to see Marsden as Chips after seeing him as the unforthcoming Dalgliesh in “Shroud for a Nightingale” earlier this season and in two previous P. D. James “Mystery!” serials. The story of “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” is largely one of changes seen through Chips’ eyes; Dalgliesh is also a primarily passive character.

“He’s a curious receiver,” Marsden says. “He’s not an initiator. I look on the Dalgliesh stories as a bit like an audience game show. The principal rule to observe is to let everything appear on the screen. Dalgliesh should have no information disallowed the audience. They should be capable of solving the crime at the same time as I do.

“Most stories in this genre have been set in the ‘30s. The James stories are completely up to date. They’re absolutely exact in obeying all the rules of modern police investigation.”

In “Shroud for a Nightingale,” the story was complicated and enriched by the stone-faced Dalgliesh’s unmistakable attraction to the woman ultimately identified as the culprit. “It’s very difficult to imbue the character with his own inner life without swamping the whodunit plot. Still, I’m trying to make him more vulnerable.”

Marsden’s next appearance as Dalgliesh will be in “Cover Her Face,” which starts airing March 26. One further P. D. James dramatization has been completed, “The Black Tower.” In this story, Marsden says, “Dalgliesh has been injured and he’s recuperating throughout. He’s not a man who’s full of humor anyway, and he becomes quite bad-tempered.”

After making “The Black Tower,” Marsden said he wouldn’t play Dalgliesh any more. Then James published “A Taste for Death.” “I had been determined not to make any more of them. But having read this new volume, which is so good it’s almost as if written by a totally different person, I’ll probably make it, possibly during 1988.”