BROADWAY TO TV : CHANNING’S RETURN: A ‘HALLMARK’

Since her last dramatic appearance on television two years ago, Stockard Channing has won a Tony Award as Broadway’s best actress in 1985 (for “Joe Egg”) and received a Tony nomination in 1986 (for “The House of Blue Leaves”).

But these back-to-back theatrical honors do not mean she is abandoning the living room screen.

“I was looking for a good television role,” she said here the other day, “but I hadn’t found anything of great interest.” Then, into her life came “The Room Upstairs,” a new “Hallmark Hall of Fame” drama that will air Saturday on CBS (9-11 p.m., Channels 2 and 8).

“When I read the script, I was struck by it and thought it quite unusual for prime-time network television,” she said. “It had an aura, at least on the page, of a theatrical film . . . rather like an English film because the tone was very gentle and poignant. It’s not sensational or exploitive . . . and when they told me the people they wanted to be in it, I thought it would be a very interesting working experience.”

The “people” include co-stars Sam Waterston, himself fresh from a Broadway run in “The Benefactors,” and Linda Hunt, the Academy Award-winning actress from “The Year of Living Dangerously.”

In the “Hallmark” play, Waterston is a cellist who rents “the room upstairs” in the boarding house Channing has created from her old family home. Hunt runs the clinic/halfway house where Channing excels in teaching hard-to-reach children.

Between her boarders and troubled students, Channing’s character is surrounded by an unusual group. She’d prefer to keep her distance from all of them, but. . . .

“Often on TV,” Channing said, “you play a character that is larger than life, or a character with very bold problems, or the piece is hooked up with some burning issue of contemporary life.

“The one very dramatic element in this picture has to do with an investigation of this woman’s character and how we watch her emerge from her shutdown emotional shell. Basically, she’s antisocial with the outside world, so the challenge is to make her understandable and make the audience relate to her.”

Since Channing left her Broadway role last summer, she has been going full tilt. She went directly into “Man’s Fate” on stage in Hyde Park, N.Y., with Bill Murray (“It was kind of like ‘Animal House’ on the Hudson”). Then she flew to Yugoslavia for a World War II film titled “Destiny” with William Hurt, finishing that last fall in San Diego just as “Room Upstairs” was starting up in Boston and Vancouver.

Now, she’s looking forward to some time off “to deal with the more mundane things in life . . . going back to New York, unpacking, seeing some theater and movies and friends I haven’t seen in ages.”

She bases herself in New York now after spending some time in Los Angeles where she did a couple of series for CBS, as well as some TV movies, including “The Girl Most Likely To,” “Silent Victory: The Story of Kitty O’Neal” and “Not My Kid,” which aired two years ago this month.

Returning to New York after living here, she said she was made aware “much to my chagrin that despite the fact I had started acting on stage and had done some quite substantial stuff, people often associated me with the movie ‘Grease’ or with TV comedies.

“When we first did ‘Joe Egg’ (in which she played the mother of a spastic daughter), a lot of people said ‘I didn’t know she could do that!’ It was lucky I went back and did that play. I didn’t realize how pigeon-holed I might have been.

“I was kind of dumb about those things. I hadn’t been on stage for a while and wanted to go back to it. I didn’t intend for that kind of effect, but I’m sure in many circles it emerged that I had done some sort of turnaround, when in fact that is really my background. I didn’t go back to the New York stage with an ‘I’ll show the world intention,’ because I didn’t really think the world had to be shown.”

Looking ahead to the airing of “The Room Upstairs,” Channing confessed that she may not watch it Saturday night. “I get very shy about those things,” she said. “I watch them later by myself after everything has kind of calmed down and life has moved on.”

She said when she began acting in films, “I used to love to watch myself. I was just fascinated. Now I’m getting like an old dog. I have a dog like that. She was frisky when she was younger; now she’s about nine and if there’s a thunderstorm, she crawls under the couch. That’s like me watching myself on film. I get twitchier and twitchier.

“I think it comes from being on stage and not in the audience. Maybe I’ll grow up one day and not be such a child about this, but I don’t like feeling self-conscious, especially when it’s after the fact.”

But will she really not be tuned in Saturday night? “Well,” she conceded, “maybe I will watch . . . with my paws over my eyes.”