Sentimental Favorites : Paul Newman has been nominated seven times for Best Actor and has never won. Marlee Matlin has never had a movie role before. Now each has a chance to walk away with an Oscar.

THERE COULDN’T BE three more symbolic words in the language of Hollywood than the envelope please. Like the pressing of a stopwatch, they signal the start of that most elegant of moments when every Oscar contender is bound equally by hope. At this year’s 59th awards presentation, on March 30, two of the nominees, coming from unusually different acting backgrounds and personal perspectives, will be caught in that spotlighted instant.

Seven times a contender, never a champion, Paul Newman at 62 is still waiting for his Best Actor Oscar. Every so often members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognize a perennial runner-up not only for an individual performance but for an entire body of work. John Wayne received such an accolade in 1969. This year, Paul Newman is being judged not only for his nominated role as “Gramps” Fast Eddie Felson in 1986’s “The Color of Money” but also for four decades of anti-heroes in such classics as “Cool Hand Luke” and “The Hustler.”

And occasionally, Academy members honor a newcomer whose first major performance has achieved a kind of greatness due to circumstance. In 1985, Cambodian refugee Haing S. Ngor won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in “The Killing Fields” playing a man who, like himself, had survived a hideous war. This year 21-year-old Marlee Matlin stole her movie, “Children of a Lesser God,” without uttering a single word in her role as Sarah Norman, a young deaf woman. Still, Matlin’s could become one of the most short-lived of stardoms if her own hearing impairment prevents her from ever being cast in another major role.

With eight other nominees, the two will wait for the watch to stop and wonder if their time has come.

In 1986 Paul Newman thought his moment had come and gone when he was awarded an honorary Oscar recognizing “his personal integrity and dedication to his craft.” He felt it was “for people who are already up to their knees in weeds. But at least I was working at the time on “The Color of Money,” so I knew something that they didn’t know: that the pasture was quite a bit in front of me.”

Newman suspected that he was giving an Oscar-quality performance under Martin Scorsese’s direction. So he doesn’t mind when others tout him as this year’s sure thing. “I think it’s nifty of them,” he says. “And I’m getting a lot of that, yes.”

But anyone who expects Newman to come right out and say, “Yes, I want the Oscar,” is going to have to wait until those blue eyes turn brown. Newman darts around the issue while still managing to convey the absurdity of his winless condition. “It’s like everything else. What’s important to you on Tuesday is not important to you on Thursday and then becomes very important to you the following Tuesday.”

All well and good, but sitting in a windowless coffin of a screening room at Trans-Audio Studios in mid-town Manhattan, where he has spent the last two weeks mixing his latest directorial venture, “The Glass Menagerie,” Newman realizes that today is a Wednesday. He crinkles his well-established wrinkles, and laughs, first quietly, then uncontrollably. The more he laughs, the more he begins to see, somehow, a parallel between Oral Roberts’ recent plea for money and his own imagined plea for Oscar.

“Um,” he says, starting slowly, building up, “Oral Roberts has said that if he doesn’t raise the money by the end of March, God is going to call him home. Then whatever will He do to me?

“My next project is floundering. So if those guys out there don’t tap me for this, I think I’m going to go to that great rehearsal hall in the sky.”

Even as a joke, it’s as close to begging as Newman may ever come.

In contrast with Cool Hand Luke’s profane levity, Marlee Matlin reveres her nomination. Weeks after becoming the first deaf actress so blessed by the Academy, she is still gushing. “I feel very, very wonderful. I feel very, very honored.”

In a Palm Springs hotel room where the desert sunshine backlights her chestnut curls and moon-white skin with an otherworldly halo, sans new boyfriend (fellow Oscar nominee and “Children” co-star William Hurt, who has already won a Best Actor for 1985’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman”), Matlin jumps up and down excitedly as she talks. “When I was a little girl,” she informs through a furious but fluid burst of signing translated by her personal assistant and interpreter Jack Jason, “I always watched the Academy Awards on television. I always thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice just to be there? Wouldn’t it be nice just to be in one film even?’ And it all came true.”

To complete the fantasy, of course, Matlin has to win. Naturally she still hasn’t considered all the ramifications of going from Oscar-nominated actress to Oscar-winning actress. Or what price losing could cost her fledgling career. “I like to take things one day at a time,” she says. At the moment she is simply obsessed with getting to the podium in one piece. “If it just so happens I win, I would imagine that I would walk up there so perfectly in my high heels, get up to the very last step and trip and fall flat on my face.”

It nearly happened to Matlin earlier this year, when she got up to accept her Golden Globe for best actress in a feature film drama. Feeling herself about to plunge headfirst off the stairs, she grabbed for an usher’s hand. No one noticed. Matlin feels, judging from their surprised looks, that her fellow actors were too busy trying to figure out just who she was. “I noticed that Danny Thomas had the funniest expression on his face,” Matlin’s mother recalls. “He just looked around and wondered.”

But, say, Matlin’s name is announced and she is able to retrieve her Oscar without incident. “If I win, I’m going to make a speech. I don’t know what I’ll say. But Jack will be standing next to a microphone, and I’ll be signing,” she predicts. In addition to her best friend, who is also a deaf actress, and Matlin’s 6-year-old nephew, her parents will attend the awards show. “They made me what I am. If I win, I will thank them the most,” Marlee adds.

Her mother, Libby, is already carrying around a Kleenex. “Oh God, I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it,” she says.

THESE DAYS, THE BURGEONING ranks of first-role Academy Award nominees such as Matlin, and the scores of post-adolescents who populate Hollywood’s teen-age blockbusters, “confuse the hell” out of Newman. Mention John Hughes. “Who’s he?” is Newman’s response.

Maybe he’s seen one of Hughes’ movies. “Pretty in Pink”? “Never heard of it.”

Molly Ringwald, a Time magazine cover subject? Another blank look. “Um,” Newman says, “I’m not getting into this discussion.”

He apologizes. “I have a terrible thing with names. I absolutely freeze. There’s some mechanism inside that trips off, that makes everything go very still and quiet and nothing works.” But he’s always genteel about it. For instance, although others have discussed it, he won’t talk about the time when Marsha Mason approached him on a transcontinental flight. She praised his latest bit of acting and said, “Oh, we must work together sometime soon.” Replied Newman: “I’d really like that.” When Mason had left his side and moved out of earshot, he turned to the stewardess and asked, “Who was that?” (Mason and Newman are good friends now.)

Newman gulps down a kosher chicken soup with egg noodles from the Carnegie Deli around the corner, complains about the head cold that has dogged him since November and then begins to lament the passing of a period he calls “the golden age.” It’s as if this son of a Jewish sporting-goods store owner from Shaker Heights, Ohio; this Navy Pilot Training Program reject and World War II torpedo-bomber radioman; this stage and television actor who married the understudy (Joanne Woodward) to the lead (Kim Stanley) in his first break on Broadway (“Picnic”); this father, movie director, race-car driver and cook; it’s as if he wants to tell the world that no one knew how well they had it back then. Then there were films. There were plays. There was even television. “It hadn’t been designed for the lowest common denominator yet. We thought it was very innovative,” he says wistfully. “Boy, there was work. You got a week off and you could be right back in a film or on television or in a play. The theater itself had a real sense of health about it. And movies reflected that. There were more ‘serious’ films.”

Then things started to go sour, he says. “The change has been so slow, and it’s happened over half a lifetime, that you can’t always pinpoint what caused the deterioration. You simply know it’s there.” He pauses. “But it’s really hard to blame Hollywood. Which came first? Did Hollywood create the climate for teen-age movies, or did the audience? We ought to know who the enemy is before we attack them.”

The ‘80s may have been a dry decade for many actors, but they have brought Newman some of his most memorable characters--Michael Gallagher in “Absence of Malice,” Frank Galvin in “The Verdict,” Fast Eddie Felson in “The Color of Money.” He has received Best Actor nominations for all three. (Newman’s other nominations were for roles in “Cool Hand Luke,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Hud” and “The Hustler.” He was not nominated for two of his most famous movies: “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”) So what if these days Newman plays near-geezers whose spindly legs and watering eyes and sunken cheeks are part of his new screen image. He claims that he has never cared about being a sex symbol anyway. After all, “if you can get by on your baby blues,” he asks rhetorically, “then what does it mean to be anything in the profession?” Just as he wondered, years ago, what it meant about his craft when three of Hollywood’s biggest stars were “two robots and a shark.”

WHETHER OR NOT SHE WINS an Oscar on her first try, Marlee Matlin will receive her largest mass medium exposure as a presenter on the Academy Awards telecast, handing out the award for Best Sound. “They asked me, ‘Do you feel insulted?’ And I said, ‘Nooooo! I think it’s far out!’ ” she recalls. Matlin, barely out of her teens, talks like a teen; she says “far out” and “B.F.D.” and she swears like a truck driver--a rather rebellious habit her mother fervently hopes her daughter will soon outgrow. Marlee thinks it’s a “real riot” that her most frequently aired “Children” film clip shows her signing a ferocious expletive. She gloats that “all the deaf people are sitting back and saying, ‘Hey, we have the right to swear on television and no one knows.’ ”

It was also a “riot” at Paramount’s recent 75th anniversary party, where the studio’s stars from all generations gathered for a giant photo session and where Matlin presented Robin Williams with a book on how to sign sexual behavior. “Whoopi (Goldberg) said we should do it. It was such a great idea. Robin was going around the Paramount birthday party holding it up and signing things like ‘orgasm.’ ” Matlin had her picture taken with Tom Cruise and Williams, who then asked everyone to start signing sexual terms. “Tom Cruise was fascinated, and he learned, too. And everybody was looking at me because I had taught them those signs. I hope that they don’t put that picture in Life magazine, because a lot of deaf people would say, ‘Whaaat?’ ”

Matlin does not shy away from sex--or sensuality. In fact, it was her powerful sensuality that helped her land the role of Sarah Norman in “Children,” and then her relationship with co-star Bill Hurt. Soon after the two met, during Matlin’s audition for the film, they were smitten. “I’m speaking for me,” she warns, “not for Bill. But for me it was love at first sight.”

Matlin holds at bay any interviewer who pries into the relationship. “Boy, you’re getting really nosy,” she says. But Matlin affirms that the love affair is going strong despite rumors to the contrary, rumors fueled by the fact that the pair recently checked in at the Betty Ford Center together. Asked about the reasons for the visit, Matlin replies only: “I’m not in a position to talk about that. We’re both very happy. It’s important to say that. And that we’re doing very well.”

The last two years have been filled with new highs. And lows. The movie, Matlin says, “was a lot of emotional and physical, good and bad, times.” She was homesick; she had never spent so much time away from her family. Now she has moved out of her parents’ house and into Hurt’s Manhattan apartment. She jets between New York and Los Angeles and has recently been to London, Rome, Yugoslavia and Barbados; her next trip is to Paris. She has an agent, a press spokesman, an assistant to balance her checkbook. There’s not much left for her parents to do except fill out her tax returns.

There is something so new and unreal about her overnight ascent that Matlin seems to deal with it all by refusing to deal with it. “I don’t think of myself as a star. Remember that,” she cautions. “I think of myself as just Marlee.” Still, now that all the congratulatory notes have come in, “it’s a little different. Only a little.” But a lot of name-dropping is going on. How Liz Taylor came up to her. And Bette Midler knew her name. And Jennifer Beals, Amy Irving and Steven Spielberg were all so nice to her. Matlin is unabashedly star-struck. But she really doesn’t know who many stars are. Matlin never went to the movies while growing up because movies weren’t captioned for the deaf. Now she’s familiar with most of the younger actors but not many in the older crowd. So as not to slight anyone at the Paramount party, she and Jack Jason worked out a code whereby Jason would open his eyes wide to indicate that a VIP was approaching.

PAUL NEWMAN, TOO, is an outsider in today’s Hollywood. He has chosen to live on the East Coast (the Newmans sold everything they owned in California five years ago), and he doesn’t read Variety or anything else that might provide him with an insider’s knowledge of show business. In an industry noted for cost overruns, he prides himself on bringing his pictures in under budget. He manages to star in or direct “important pictures.” He was motivated to direct his current project, “The Glass Menagerie” (which stars his wife, Joanne Woodward), in order to become an “archivist, to put Tennessee on the screen as he was written.” How did he get it made? “It’s not tough when everybody works for nothing,” he says with a sigh.

Still, these days Paul Newman is being especially politic about Hollywood. Ask him about the other Best Actor nominees this year and he shakes his head. “You’re not going to get me to say bad things. I will only say good things about other people’s work.” But if someone does give a really great performance or directs a truly fine film, Newman admits to feeling some envy. “Oh, sure,” he sighs. “But I also feel uplifted when I see something really good. You come out and you’re just hopping.” Newman claims that one of his best-played roles wasn’t ever seen. “I was terrific as Rachel, you know. I was really great in that role.” Huh? While directing “Rachel, Rachel,” Newman pictured himself in every role. Even when he just sees a movie, “things happen to my head. I have a very busy day,” he explains. “I’ll be acting all 14 parts. I re-edit it. I re-score it. I redirect it. I change all the locations around. I’m looking for another screenwriter.” Was he a better Rachel than his wife, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress? “No, I wasn’t as good as Joanne,” he acknowledges. “But I was pretty good. I could have gone out on the road.”

He’ll never win a Best Actress award, but this year he’s got his best chance for Best Actor. Still, Newman, after appearing in nearly 50 films and directing half a dozen, isn’t any closer now to understanding what constitutes a prize-winning performance. “I can understand how you can be competitive about automobile racing, because you have to get from one point to another. The first one there is the winner. But I don’t know how you can be competitive about acting. There’s nothing clean about it.” He liked his portrayals in “Absence of Malice” and “The Verdict” almost as much as “The Color of Money.”

“In ‘The Color of Money,’ he says, “the choices that were available to the actor to explore were more theatrical. They were tastier. There was a lot of relish. ‘The Verdict’ was much more internal, somehow a little bit more delicate. ‘Absence of Malice’ was a very head-on, straight-on part.

“But who’s to say which performance is better? That’s what I mean. If even the actor has difficulty describing the difference between the parts, then how valid can the observances be of someone who is completely remote and simply a spectator?”

Perhaps that’s why, in Newman’s estimation, some notable performances go unrecognized by the Academy. For instance, he says he is astonished that Martin Scorsese was not nominated for Best Director this year. “I have no idea why he wasn’t. Because I can measure the caliber of his work against other people I’ve worked with. I know what he’s put into it. And I know the sense of delight as an actor that I had to work with him.” Newman found “The Color of Money” one of his best acting experiences ever; “so fun,” he says, that “it wouldn’t have bothered me at all if the picture had never been distributed. That would have been the perfect movie. Because then all that really would have mattered was the work. It would be wonderful if the results of it were simply not important.” As you get older, Newman says, the experience of the work becomes the important thing, while the public and critical reaction to it become less and less and less important. “Until, finally, I suppose, as I get engulfed by my dotage,” he pauses here to let the elegance of the word sink in, “that it will not have any measurable effect on me at all.”

IT’S PRECISELY THE CRITICISM of Matlin’s work, she fears, that stands between her and an Oscar, between her and other major roles. Criticism that in “Children” she wasn’t acting, but only playing herself. Matlin names the film critics who so accuse. “But why do they overlook the fact that I’m playing a character? Yes, a deaf character. But a character all the same,” she stresses. Matlin claims that her critics are being unfair not only to her but to all deaf actors and actresses; these critiques expose the prejudice that hearing people perpetuate against deaf people. “No one says it was easy for Whoopi Goldberg in ‘The Color Purple’ because she was black and playing a black person,” she says. “Acting is part of you and what you do. But to say that I’m playing myself is to say I wasn’t acting. I was acting. I was working very hard. I was playing a role.

“Sarah is a lot different than me,” Matlin continues. “I tend to be very open, and she’s the opposite. She’s in a shell. I sign a lot slower than she does. She’s very jerky in the way she signs, and her signs have a lot more tension in them. I sign a little more fluidly and relaxed. It’s a different style.” Their life experiences couldn’t be more opposite. “Sarah had a completely different educational background. She went to a school for the deaf. I didn’t. She wouldn’t speak. I do. We have different family backgrounds. In our family, we shared, we gave a lot of love and attention, we understood each other’s needs.”

There is one thing Matlin used to share with Sarah until two years ago--a festering, sometimes explosive anger about the cruelty of being deaf in a hearing world. Matlin says she was once consumed by self-pity, that the world was forcing her to feel “inferior” to hearing people. It made her not try to do the things she could do; it made her try to do things she simply never could. And although she started acting when she was 8, with the Children’s Theater of the Deaf in Illinois, she’d given up performing by her 16th birthday. But then, when auditions were announced for a short run of “Children of a Lesser God” on stage in Chicago in 1985, she tried out for the secondary part of Lydia and, with apparent effortlessness, got it. On opening night the production was informed that an agent was in the audience looking to cast for a long-delayed film version of “Children” to be directed by Randa Haines. Matlin thought she might have a crack at Lydia. Instead, the producers saw her videotape and wanted her to try out for the lead. Matlin was sunbathing at her parents’ house in early summer when the phone rang, her teletypewriter clicked on, and her agent asked if she would perform a nude scene. “Certainly,” she said. “I’ll be an actress. I want the role.” Two minutes later the agent called back and said, “You got it.”

Since that time, Matlin’s enormous anger--the emotion that once infested her relationships, her work, her life--has abated. It was, she says, the rediscovery of acting that mitigated the fury.

“Acting,” Matlin says, “was just something that made me feel good as a person.” And now she is burning with hunger for all the career possibilities that could lie within her grasp. There are so many roles she wants. Comedy. A murder mystery. A classic thriller. She wants to mature from ingenue to artisan. She hopes to soon start refining her skills at the HB Studios, run by famed Uta Hagen in Manhattan, which has teachers familiar with sign language. This April, Matlin starts filming a small but important part in “Walker,” in which she plays Ed Harris’ deaf girlfriend. But Matlin knows Hollywood will have to be pushed to let a deaf actress play a non-deaf person. “They’re very afraid,” she says. “But there are some people out there that do accept me and want to write scripts for me to be involved in. People like Kurt Luedtke. Jon Voight. Robin Williams. Whoopi Goldberg. Special people. Special projects.”

And she hopes someday to be accepted or rejected for parts for reasons other than her deafness. “I don’t want to be labeled as a deaf actress,” Matlin insists. “I’m an actress who just doesn’t happen to hear. Each actor has his or her own particular deficiencies at something. Well, Danny DeVito happens to be short. And Meryl Streep happens to be somebody who’s not. And so on. But they still act.”

Newman wants to keep acting, too. “But I’m not driven to the extent that I will take up a bad script in order to work,” he says. “Although I don’t know. I may have to do that if something doesn’t show up. After a while, you simply have to keep an instrument oiled. You can’t just throw it in the garage and pick it up every four or five years and expect it to work.”

Instead, consider the immediate future. In two weeks’ time, all Paul Newman, Marlee Matlin and the other Academy Award nominees will care about is the start of Oscar’s stopwatch. First they’ll listen for the words, “the envelope please.” Then they’ll strain to hear the rip of the opening envelope.