ACTRESS JUDITH IVEY JUGGLES STAGE AND SCREEN

“I don’t have to deal with typecasting,” declared esteemed character actress Judith Ivey. “I’ve avoided that by proving myself capable of portraying a wide variety of characters. Consequently, there aren’t really any types of parts that I yearn to play but can’t get cast in, and I’m very happy with my career.”

A recipient of two Tony awards (for the Nell Dunn play “Steaming” and David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly”), Ivey is best known for her stage work, but made a strong impression on the filmgoing public last year with her sassy performance in “Compromising Positions.” Playing a lascivious suburbanite with a charmingly knowing attitude toward the ways of the flesh, Ivey more or less stole the picture with her sultry performance. In fact, Ivey’s greatest successes on both stage and screen have found her playing the sort of women generally referred to as “broads.”

She portrays a decidedly different stereotype in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” The first part of a trilogy chronicling Simon’s youth in Brooklyn (the final installment, “Broadway Bound,” is playing on Broadway to generally favorable reviews), “Brighton Beach” finds Ivey cast as Aunt Blanche, an asthmatic widow you might expect to find eating lox and bagels at Canter’s.

Speaking by phone from Louisiana where she’s at work on a film titled “Sister, Sister,” Ivey enthused that she “loved playing Aunt Blanche. I’m primarily known for playing rather blowsy women and Aunt Blanche is very much a departure from that. She’s shy, timid and unsure of herself. That’s out of character as far as what people have seen me do in my work--but that’s not out of character for me.”

It’s hard to think of this enormously confident woman as timid. A native of Texas, Ivey, 35, has been steadily employed as an actress for 14 years and seems to be on the verge of advancing into the movie major leagues. Though she’s an attractive woman, Ivey has never traded on her looks. When asked if she felt that female thespians were still required to be sex goddesses in order to land leading roles, she modestly replied with a laugh, “Gee, I sure hope not.”

Despite mixed reviews, the film should be good for Ivey’s career; Neil Simon has an uncanny knack for striking a responsive chord in America’s mass adudience.

“Neil Simon is very good at creating balanced characters that are not only tragic or only comical, but a combination of both,” Ivey observed. “He’s also very good about providing plenty of information about his characters for actors and actresses to draw upon. Aunt Blanche could, of course, have been interpreted as simply tragic, but I think I brought more humor to the part than the way it was written.

“Not that I have any complaints about the script,” she continued, “and I had a great time making the film. It was directed by Gene Saks, who’s worked as an actor himself, and that made him a wonderful director to work for. He understands the process and pretty much left it up to the actors to interpret their parts as they saw fit. As a rule, it’s difficult to watch yourself, but I enjoyed seeing the film--and my own work in it--and was pleased with the way the movie was put together.”

In “Sister, Sister,” a steamy Southern Gothic tale set on a crumbling plantation in Lousiana written and directed by Bill Condon, Ivey co-stars with Jennifer Jason-Leigh. Ivey plays “a woman who’s spent her life taking care of her younger sister because of a secret they’ve shared since they were young girls. She’s turned their plantation into a bed and breakfast place and has never married,” Ivey explained. “The film unravels the mystery of why these two attractive women live together and never have relationships.”

Though Ivey obviously has no trouble finding challenging film parts of a varying nature, she remains loyal to the scene of her earliest success, the New York stage.

“I still prefer working on the stage to working in film,” she said. “And as soon as ‘Sister, Sister’ wraps I’ll be returning to New York to begin rehersals for Noel Coward’s ‘Blithe Spirit,’ which opens on Broadway in the spring.”