WHERE RUSSELL DIRECTS, CONTROVERSY FOLLOWS

It seems a pity that director Ken Russell never thought of doing some acting as a sideline, the way John Huston occasionally does. For with his shock of white hair, Beethoven-like scowl and steely blue eyes, Russell would have made a splendid villain in some James Bond movie.

Of course, as a director, some critics have long cast him as a villain, accusing him of ruining operas, falsifying history and demolishing the reputations of the greats--from D. H. Lawrence to Tchaikovsky to Debussy.

Just three months ago, he directed “Mephistopheles” in Genoa, Italy, and the production was deemed so outrageous that fighting broke out in the auditorium and armed police were called to the theater.

Russell’s reaction to all this?

Frankly, my dear, he doesn’t give a damn.

Audiences may not start fighting in the theater when his latest movie, “Gothic,” opens Friday, but some critics in Britain, where the film has already been seen, seized the opportunity to once again berate him.

“Some were quite vicious,” he said the other day on a visit to Los Angeles. “But I’m used to that by now.”

“Gothic,” starring Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands and Natasha Richardson, the daughter of Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave, is a fantasy woven around a night spent at Lord Byron’s villa in Switzerland by four visitors--Percy Bysshe Shelley; his mistress, Mary Godwin; her stepsister, Claire; and Dr. John Polidori.

During an evening well laced with laudanum, Mary, it is said, dreamed up the idea for “Frankenstein” and Polidori came up with “Vampyre,” believed to be the inspiration for “Dracula.”

“I felt pretty positive about the story when it was sent to me,” said Russell. “It was extremely visual, which attracted me.

“And the use of laudanum gave me a springboard for my ideas. It was extremely prevalent in 19th-Century English literature, of course; Wordsworth and Coleridge were heavy into it. In his journal, Wordsworth said, ‘I take it only for a headache.’ His wife’s journal noted: ‘Poor William had another headache today. He has them most days, poor dear.’ ”

Russell is clearly elated that at last he got a movie project onto the screen. In recent years, every film in which he has expressed interest or with which he has become involved has collapsed beneath him--”The Beethoven Secret,” “Callas” and “Evita” among them.

So the director of such movies as “The Devils,” “Women in Love” and “Tommy” turned his eye to opera. He has directed several, among them “The Rake’s Progress” in Florence, “The Soldiers” in Lyons and “Madame Butterfly” in Charleston and Spoleto.

All of them proved controversial.

In “The Rake’s Progress,” staged at the time of Britain’s war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, he included Margaret Thatcher in the opera. “Madame Butterfly” was updated to World War II so that the atom bomb could be featured. In “La Boheme,” he had Nazis strutting about. “But in not one of them did I change one word of the libretto,” he said.

Why had his recent production in Genoa caused such a furor?

“Well, in that, Marguerite is supposed to be in prison accused of murdering her mother and drowning her baby. I turned the prison into an Italian kitchen and had her doing the ironing and watching TV while she sang. This drove those macho Italians out of their skulls with rage--the very idea of suggesting an Italian kitchen is a prison.

“Later, she went to the icebox and there was her mother, neatly cut up inside. That sent them all berserk. But they went really ape when she opened the lid of the washing machine and took out the drowned baby. That’s when the police had to be called.”

Now Russell is to stage his first opera in Britain: “Tannhaeuser.” But before that, he has been asked to direct his first play on Broadway--”Macbeth,” starring Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson.

“One day, my phone rang,” he said. “ ‘Hello, Ken, Glenda here. How would you like to direct ‘Macbeth’ with me and Chris Plummer?’ ‘I’ve never done a play,’ I said. ‘Then it’s about bloody time you did,’ she said. And that was it.

“I’ve always backed off doing a play because I’m better with music than words. I always feel a bit naked with just words. But I plan to use taped music in this production for atmosphere. And it’ll be nice to work with Glenda again.”

Because of the success of “Women in Love,” his 1969 movie that earned an Oscar for Jackson, Russell has been trying to raise the financing for another D. H. Lawrence story--”The Rainbow.”

“I’ve had no luck with that,” he said. “But there’s a Lawrence novella, ‘St. Mawr’--about a horse and two women--that may go. I’ve already written the script for it and we’ve got 40% of the money. Although it’s a novella, it’s the perfect length for a film. ‘Women in Love’ was so long, you know, that we had to lose a lot of the story.”

He also is writing his autobiography for Britain’s Heinemann publishing house.

“A book about me, ‘An Appalling Talent,’ was published in Britain about 10 years ago,” he said. “In that, the author wrote the first chapter and tape-recorded me for the rest of the book. I thought I could just read what I’d said before and put it in my biography, but it didn’t work.

“So Heinemann gave me (director-producer) Michael Powell’s book to read (‘A Life in Movies,’ a 670-page tome that covers only the first half of Powell’s career). The idea was to encourage me but I’m susceptible to influence, so I decided not to read it until my own is finished. Powell is rather like me in that he was despised and reviled and loathed by the critics--so much so that he virtually stopped making films.

“What did encourage me is that the chap at Heinemann I’m dealing with recently told me, ‘My favorite biography is Isadora Duncan’s “My Life.” ’ I asked him why and he said, ‘Because there’s not one word of truth in it.’ So my autobiography is going to be written like a novel, not a standard life story.”

Russell, 59, who lives with his wife, writer Vivian Jolly, and their 9-year-old daughter, Mollie, in England’s beautiful Lake District (which doubled for Switzerland in “Gothic”), rarely goes to movies.

“I prefer to watch things on video or TV. The best screening of ‘Tommy’ (his 1975 film of the rock opera) I’ve ever seen went out on BBC not long ago; a perfect print, beautifully in focus. When I do go to the cinema, I’m usually appalled how badly films are presented.

“I watched one of my films, ‘Mahler,’ in Amsterdam once and it was so out of focus I complained to the manager. He did nothing about it, so I went up to the projection booth myself. There was nobody there. I found out that the manager had four cinemas in Amsterdam and just one projectionist who went from one to the other on a bicycle. Incredible, when you think of the care and time lavished on making a film.”

Russell awaits the Los Angeles reviews of “Gothic” without trepidation. Daily Variety has already called it “the thinking man’s ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ ” and one New York review called it “an anthology of horror film mannerisms that looks like a ‘60s LSD trip.” Whatever is said, he believes he will be treated better here than he is in his native land.

“There,” he said, “they (the critics) just don’t like me. They take every opportunity to twist the knife.”