‘ARIZONA’S’ HOLLY HUNTER IS SMALL BUT GETTING BIG

She breezes into the hotel bar in shades and an oversized tweed coat and sticks out her hand. “Hi Howyrayoo.” Then she throws back two OJs, straight up, brushing her brown bangs from her eyes. They won’t stay up. She blows upward. They’re still in her eyes. She gives up, stabbing the bowl of miniature pretzels, popping those babies in one by one.

Any day now, Holly Hunter is going to be big. Really big. She’s not big now. Only 5 feet 2. Sissy Spacek-size before “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Sally Field-size before “Norma Rae.” She may be the smallest new comic actress in America. And the hottest.

“I think I have a good sense of humor but I’m not a funny. . . . “ Her voice trails off. “I’m not like a stand-up comedienne at all. I don’t tell a good joke. I don’t keep people holding their sides.”

She talks in a hoarse, Southern-fried twang. Oh what a twang! Slicker than a dab of Dixie Peach pomade, it could charm the stubble off Don Johnson’s chin. She says “May-an” and “ayn’t” and “knowatahmean” and “bayhhy-bee.” But don’t try to imitate her. She is not amused.

“I hate being imitated,” she says. “I’m imitated all the time. ‘Hiii Holleh howrya doin?’ Oooh, that’s not how I sound. I know I have an accent. I’m very aware of that.”

She has an earnest, scrappy, small-town quality; takes herself pretty seriously; doesn’t smile readily, though she does let out an occasional snicker.

“My comedy comes from a very serious place. It’s a matter of being in grave circumstances and taking it very seriously or having something truly at stake that I think makes things funny.”

At 28, already a veteran of a brace of Broadway plays, she is starring in her first major film, “Raising Arizona”--the new comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen, the folks who brought you the cult hit “Blood Simple.”

She plays Edwina, a former police officer who weds ex-con Hi (Nicolas Cage). The honeymoon ends when the couple cannot have what they most desire: a baby. They can’t adopt, given Hi’s criminal record and all, so they decide to kidnap one of the quintuplets born to Nathan Arizona, an unpainted-furniture mogul.

If it sounds like an unlikely premise for a comedy, it is. But Hunter, with her fierce little eyes and drier-than-the-panhandle wit, transforms the hick heroine into a rich and sympathetic character.

New York magazine praises Hunter’s work as “an original comic performance, combining larceny and righteousness, covetousness and love.” People magazine calls the young actress “an endearing amalgam of feisty and fragile.”

And, of course, everybody’s bonkers over the babies.

“We had a couple of baby wranglers that were really great,” Hunter says, explaining how the film makers handled the tots. No, she says, it didn’t make her yearn to be a mother. “But I certainly did love the baby who was Nathan Jr. He was a fascinating child, and brought a real humane aspect to doing the movie. It wasn’t like being on other sets because there was a baby involved and he had no respect for the camera. He had no awareness of meal penalties or overtime. If he didn’t feel like doing a scene, then we had to wait and have him take a nap.”

She met Joel and Ethel Coen when they were casting for “Blood Simple.” They kept in touch and finally sent Hunter the “Raising Arizona” script. The part of Edwina had been written with her in mind. Midway through the first reading, she called them--screaming with delight.

She loves the Coens and their offbeat brand of movie making.

“We were constantly aware we were making a movie. It was not brain surgery. It was not real life. It was a movie. Joel and Ethan are very much that way. This is a movie movie. It’s a very self-conscious movie and I think they’re very self-conscious movie makers. I love that.” She takes a swig of orange juice. “ ‘Raising Arizona’ is not a film. It’s a movie. ‘Out of Africa’ is a film.”

She hopes the movie will make money, but she’s not sure. “It may not catch on like ‘Back to the Future.’ ” Here, she lets out a cackle, turning side to side and hunkering down at the table. “Let’s be serious here. It ain’t a middle-of-the-road movie. It’s made by extremists.”

She comes from a little town outside Atlanta called Conyers. It’s right off the main highway, dotted with trailer parks and RV dealerships. Holly, the youngest of seven children, grew up on a farm. Her dad was a manufacturer’s rep for sporting goods. When she was 13, she started doing plays in school. Musicals, mostly. “Oklahoma!” “The Boy Friend.”

“You name it, I think I’ve done it.” She spent a few summers apprenticing in Upstate New York after a director spotted her in a Georgia state competition. “By the time I was 16, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

She also got into music and drove a Camaro. “I wouldn’t say I was bad, but I certainly was a little rougher than some of the girls I was going to school with.”

She used to play piano but stopped performing in her teens. “I was struck completely paralyzed. I would be in the middle of a piece and have to leave. I couldn’t remember anything. So I quit playing piano in front of people because I couldn’t bear it. My hands shake too badly.”

What was the problem? “I don’t know. Fear of failing. That I was not going to be able to carry it to the end.”

Acting was different. She could be somebody else. “I don’t mind being myself. But I just don’t want to be myself in front of thousands of people. . . . I can’t get up in front of people and speak publicly at all. That is a fear I can’t overcome.”

After four years at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University, she went to New York. Her first play was off-Broadway, “Battery.” Then she starred in three of Beth Henley’s works: “Miss Firecracker Contest,” “The Wake of Jamey Foster” and “Crimes of the Heart.”

“I think there’s a misconception about southerners. Being uneducated, not up with modern technology. I can remember at one point someone explaining to me how a dishwasher worked when I first got to New York.”

Director Jonathan Demme saw her in a play and cast her in “Swing Shift” with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. “I got cut out of it,” she says.

More stage work followed, as well as a few television parts. But the regional theater gave her the skills she needed. “The camera does lie. You can look really good in a movie and maybe not be a really good actor. You may be really good in that movie because the director and the editor molded your performance. It’s very deceptive that way. You can’t do it forever. You can’t get by on that forever. I think very few people who are truly, truly good are overnight successes. I mean, generally they have been working at something for years and years.”

She is shooting her next film in Washington, opposite William Hurt and Albert Brooks. Directed by James Brooks and variously known as “Broadcast News,” “Network News” and simply “James Brooks’ Untitled,” it’s a comic look at the way it is in TV journalism today. Hunter plays Jane Craig, “a quick-minded news producer who gets promoted to the first woman bureau chief. A woman who is incredibly in command of her professional life.”

At first, Hunter says, she thought she was all wrong for the part--which she got 48 hours after reading for the director. “I read it and thought, ‘This is the most amazing woman’s part that I’ve seen. Maybe ever. The responsibility to fulfil this character was enormous. I thought Sigourney Weaver. Some big woman.”

When she was chosen, “It was like somebody dropped a bomb on my lap, you know? It was like, here’s the biggest role of your liiiiife.”

Unmarried, she lives in New York, but is temporarily ensconced in a Georgetown carriage house.

She has another feature film coming out this summer, “End of the Line” and a CBS Movie of the Week tonight entitled “The Gathering of Old Men.”

“Oh man, if I were in New York right now and not working, I’d probably be a lot more nervous about ‘Raising Arizona’ coming out.”

Talk about nervous, the other night, she found herself seated next to Ronald Reagan at a private dinner party given by Washington lobbyist Nancy Reynolds. “It was kind of a hallucination. It was extraordinary.” The President, she says admiringly, is “a great storyteller. He’s a great listener.” Hunter says she was “blown away.”

The waiter stops at the table, picks up an ornate frosted glass holding a candle and replaces it with another glass. This one has straight sides. Hunter picks it up and studies it, turning it over in the air. “I would like to drink a shot of somethin’ out of this glass.”

Suddenly, she looks even smaller. Her eyes are a little red. She is tired. After this, she says, she’s taking off for Europe.

“I’m riding a big wave right now. After this is over, I know I’ll definitely crash.”