COUNTDOWN TO OSCAR : The Toughest Act to Call

“A tough pack.” That’s what Columbia Pictures president Dawn Steele calls the five performers up for the best actress Oscar in what is regarded as the most competitive of tonight’s races.

As one high-powered agent put it: “These are all women who have worked their rears off. There’s not a political performance in the group,” meaning none of the nominees is there by virtue of an expensive advertising campaign or for sentimental reasons.

To borrow comments from agents and executives observing the race, there is: Meryl Streep, “who hits a home run whenever she steps out to act”; Glenn Close, who has pulled off “a calculated major change of direction” in her career through her role as a sexy psychotic in the box office hit “Fatal Attraction”; Holly Hunter, “the new kid in town” and an overnight star by virtue of her first leading role in a major film, “Broadcast News”; Cher, who has overcome an image as a walking “publicity stunt,” and Sally Kirkland, who will get her first really big audience tonight at the awards.

For the thousands of performers who never get a break, 43-year-old Kirkland is this year’s Cinderella story, and “Rocky” too.

There are places in her nominated performance in “Anna,” in which Kirkland plays the title role of a banged-up actress all but defeated by rejection, which aren’t that far from Kirkland’s own experiences in life.

But unlike “Anna,” Kirkland never stopped scrambling to make it as an actress. She’s appeared in 26 films, 150 plays and 40 guest roles on TV, but “The kind of roles she was cast in were not the kind that make a career,” said her manager, Richard Rosenwald.

Rosenwald partly blames the long delay before Kirkland’s current triumph on the 13 years she spent in Los Angeles, from 1972 to 1985. He takes credit for persuading her to move back to New York three years ago, when he began managing her career.

“ ‘Anna’ is the exact kind of thing that I didn’t think she was going to find in L.A.,” he said.

According to her new L.A. agents at the William Morris Agency, Fred Westheimer and Scott Zimmerman, “People (film makers) are calling us as opposed to her agents calling them, for the first time in her career.”

“The salary she made for the entire film would not cover a half of a week’s pay for any of the other Oscar nominees,”

Rosenwald said. The movie was produced for well under $1 million (as compared to the $22-million budget of “Broadcast News,” for example) and once it was completed, Kirkland’s struggle was just beginning.

Unlike her competitors for a nomination, who had box office success or multimillion-dollar studio campaigns backing their movies and performances, “Nobody was going to lift a finger to help us,” said Rosenwald.

Kirkland had rave reviews to show from “Anna’s” appearances at film festivals, but its distributor, Vestron, was hardly able to keep the movie alive in theaters long enough to get attention from academy voters. It has grossed less than $1 million at the box office.

To pay for a modest ad campaign in the trade papers, Rosenwald explained, he had to take on a partner in his business who was actually a financial backer for Kirkland’s publicity.

Though Kirkland has just finished starring in “Melanie Rose,” another low-budget, independent movie, to keep her career momentum going, Rosenwald said, “What she needs now is a major studio film or a successful film in terms of box office.”

Kirkland’s Morris agents insist her troubles are over. They say she’s being offered roles now, “most of them starring roles,” in major studio “mainstream” movies.

“The nomination alone has made the difference,” Westheimer said. “She gave a wonderful performance in ‘Anna,’ but the kind of film it was--small--served as a disadvantage in that not enough people have seen it. She seems to have overcome that obstacle.”

Not so long ago, movie executives thought of Cher as potentially damaging to business.

Her manager, Bill Sammeth, can laugh now about one painful example of the syndrome, when he and Cher trekked out to Universal Studios to see the poster that the studio would use to promote her third movie, “Mask,” in 1985.

“They made like a big unveiling and the two of us sat there like the Little Rascals with our eyes open as wide as they could be because her face wasn’t in the poster. They said they weren’t sure if it would help the picture,” he recalls.

“She said, ‘What do I have to do to prove my worth?’ ”

At the time, she had already been nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for “Silkwood.”

Cher put a strong stamp on the public consciousness as the more outrageously costumed part of Sonny & Cher, the song-and-comedy act that became a popular TV show. By the late ‘70s, her solo career had become a Vegas act.

But “Cher has always had a magical attraction,” Sammeth said.

Nonetheless, she was trying to shake her visibility when she left Los Angeles to study acting in New York little more than eight years ago. She gave up singing because “she knew that in order to be accepted by the movie industry, she’d have to stop everything else,” he said.

Her acting career was launched when she debuted on Broadway in “Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” and followed up by co-starring in the movie.

Though her success in “Moonstruck” (her third movie release last year following “The Witches of Eastwick” and “Suspect”) has eliminated studio “apprehension” about her status as an actress, Sammeth said, “We’re still out there trying to actively convince them and trying to get the outstanding scripts. There are still very few of them.”

“Whatever her battle was, she looks like she’s won in that picture of her in the ‘Moonstruck’ ads, with her toe out and her arm up in the air,” said an agent. “Even if she doesn’t win the Oscar, she’s won. It’s a complete triumph for her.”

It is already legend in the movie business that it took just one meeting with Holly Hunter, 29, for “Broadcast News” writer-director James Brooks to decide on her as the newswoman lead in the romantic comedy.

Like Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, Hunter’s swift ascent in Hollywood was preceded by years of work on the New York stage.

According to her agent, Steve Dottenville of International Creative Management: “Every major director is calling her and asking her about various projects. I’m talking about both theater and film. We’re looking at a myriad of things, but she hasn’t decided what she’s going to do next.”

But according to writer-producer Elliott Lewitt, Hunter has decided to take a gamble on a $5-million production with a first-time director (Lewitt) and a first-time screenwriter (Denis Johnson, who adapted the script from his first novel, “Angels.”)

“She adores the script,” said Dottenville of Lewitt’s project, “but this movie is not financed yet, it’s not real yet. It’s very much in the developmental stages.”

He insisted that he has “a firm commitment from Holly. She is very independently-minded. It will be her next picture after ‘Firecracker.’ I’m very close to having all the financing.”

With Hunter and a commitment from co-star Arliss Howard on the project, Lewitt anticipated no problems in shooting the movie this August. “This is a coup,” he said. “This is an actress who gets about a dozen offers a day.”

Close landed the most talked-about movie role of the year with her “Fatal Attraction” portrayal of a sexy, single woman who quickly evolves into a psychotic.

“It made Glenn a household word,” said Steel. “‘And it opened a lot of doors for her that were not opened before. ‘Fatal Attraction’ showed that she can do almost anything. People are sending her almost every kind of material now.”

Before ‘Fatal’ was a reality, Close and a lurid thriller might have seemed a contradiction in terms. Her three nominations for best supporting actress came for cool portrayals of self-controlled women (in “The World According to Garp,” “The Big Chill” and “The Natural”). Consequently, “Those are the kinds of roles that were finally offered to her,” said Steel, who had to approve the choice of Close for “Fatal Attraction” when Steel was a production executive at Paramount.

“She wasn’t the first name on our list,” Steel said, recalling that to get the role, Close “did everything, she talked to anybody and everybody who would listen.”

What can another Oscar nomination do for Close? “An Academy Award can’t ‘hoit,’ as my mother used to say, and finally and at last, it’s about the work,” Steel said. “If you keep getting nominated for the same kind of roles, it isn’t as beneficial for an actor.”

Close plays an intellectually seductive, sexually manipulative woman next in a Lorimar period piece adapted from the play ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses.’

After that, Columbia will try to keep the actress busy: “That’s my ambition,” Steel said. Columbia has three movies in the works for Close--a comedy, a tragedy and a musical.

Obviously, another nomination can’t hurt Meryl Streep, either, but most insiders are hard-pressed to say how, exactly, it could help her. Streep has already played a breathtaking range of types to the point that some critics are beginning to carp about the number of accents she’s tried.

In her wrenching “Ironweed” performance, she blackened her teeth to play a ragged derelict who barely speaks at all.

“I don’t think there’s anyone else in her category except Jane Fonda, probably because of the range of their work,” said producer Keith Barish. “But I think that goes more to their ability than their bankability.” Barish produced “Ironweed” and “Sophie’s Choice,” for which Streep won the 1982 best actress Oscar.

“A win might prove that the awards are strictly a quality contest, since she’s been nominated and won so many times before, but I’m not sure what that would do for Meryl,” one agent said.

For the record, Streep has won just twice, but the general perception is that she won’s more than that. In addition to her “Sophie” statue, she has a best supporting actress Oscar for “Kramer vs. Kramer” in 1979. She’s been nominated for four other roles beginning with “The Deerhunter” in 1978, and including “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” in 1981, “Silkwood” in 1983 and “Out of Africa” in 1985.