Brainy Bombshell

When she played the ingenue in “42nd Street” at the Shubert in 1984, brown-haired Nana Visitor was a wide-eyed red-head. Last year she went blonde. Six months ago, her hair started coming out in her hands. Now the actress is back to her natural color--and donning a platinum blonde wig for her role as bombshell naif Ellen in “Ladies’ Room” now at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood, Robin Schiff’s wisecracking tribute to the life in the lavatory.

“When I was blonde,” Visitor recalls, “people treated me like I was stupid. “I’d say, ‘Hey, it’s just hair dye. It doesn’t mean anything.’ But they’d instantly assume that I was sexy, available, into everything--which is totally untrue.

“Being blonde happened to be very lucrative, so I stayed that way for a while. But it’s really not worth it. You have three days of looking great; after that you have a five o’clock shadow. From then on it’s downhill till you go to the hairdresser again.

“It’s also like denying something of yourself--and ‘Oh no, I’ve gone Hollywood.’ In this part, everything is glued and pasted on. I joke with the producer, ‘If you ever don’t buy me spirit gum, there’s no Ellen.’ It’s all glued on: the eyelashes, the wig, those (strapless) bra things. I think Ellen feels like that too--that it’s just glue and color and not who she really is. It’s just applied .”

Visitor is the daughter of dancers (choreographer Robert Tucker and ballet teacher Nanette Charisse--aunt Cyd Charisse married into the family). Her maternal grandmother started a dancing troupe in France during World War II, joined the Paris Ballet and taught all of her 11 children to dance.

Yet at first, Visitor resisted following suit. “I went to a prep school in New York, got into Princeton--and I was going to go, but then I made a fatal mistake: auditioned for the chorus of a show and got it. I thought, ‘I’ll just do this one thing and defer a year.’ But then job after job came, and I kept deferring and deferring. I think everyone was pretty relieved that I didn’t become the black sheep of the family and not go into show business.”

Among the Charisses and Tuckers, where did the name Visitor come from?

“It’s an old family name,” says the actress, who began a stint on “L.A. Law” (playing a pushy publicist) last week. “I guess someone decided we were just visitors here and took the name.”