Well Seasoned

You remember Mary Bland.

In “Eating Raoul,” she and husband, Paul, did just that--clobbered that pesky Raoul with a skillet and had him for dinner. In the currently-on-hold “Bland Ambition,” Paul (Paul Bartel) and Mary (Mary Woronov) are back, eyeing a career in politics--and trying to check their old eating habits.

“If someone is bothering us and we don’t have the time to deal with him, we sort of bop him over the head with the frying pan,” says Woronov. “Of course, immediately afterward we say, ‘We must not do this anymore.’ But it’s something we’ve learned from the other movie, and haven’t quite been able to kick yet.”

Woronov’s roles since “Raoul” have been equally eclectic. The actress--an alumna of the infamous Andy Warhol Factory, and star of his ‘60s films, “The Beard,” “Hedy Lamarr” and “Chelsea Girls”--is awaiting the release of “Warlock,” in which she plays a clairvoyant helping warlock Julian Sands communicate with his father, the Devil. For her good efforts, “I freeze to death and shatter into a thousand pieces.”

In the upcoming “Let It Ride,” Woronov is back as a soothsayer--albeit in a lighter mode--playing a burger-stand proprietress cheering on deadbeat race-track-betting junkie Richard Dreyfuss. And in the June release of “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills,” the actress plays opposite Jacqueline Bisset as a pampered matron who, after a weekend orgy, decides to chuck it all and marry her houseboy.

When she isn’t acting, Woronov, who is a Brooklyn native and art graduate of Cornell, is most likely to be painting.

“People always ask, ‘Which do you really do?’ ” she says with a sigh. “That’s not the way it works. They’re both integral. Acting is very social; painting is so lonely. And I think you need one thing that’s all yours, that you do for yourself. Even if I became a famous painter, if someone asked me to go out and entertain three people on a street corner, I bet I would. I wouldn’t do it for a year or two, but I’d definitely give it a day. . . .”