A Shady Story

If you happen to see Meg Foster out in public, chances are she won’t be wearing dark glasses. “It never bothers me when people notice me,” says the Pennsylvania-born actress (“Leviathan,” “The Emerald Forest”), who spent much of her last stage role--”Rhythm of Torn Stars”--behind shades. “If I do wear them, it’s only because the sun is really blinding.

“On occasion, I actually find dark glasses very rude,” adds Foster, who was the original Cagney in the “Cagney & Lacey” TV series. “I like to be able to see someone’s eyes when I’m talking to them: their eyes and their hands. I don’t know what it is about hands--they’re just very expressive. I have what I call ‘potato-farmer hands.’ I always felt I should have been a farmer, on my hands and knees in a potato field.”

Instead, the acting bug bit early.

“I performed a lot at home--and of course at school--when I was a child,” says Foster, who’s currently shooting the movie “Jezebel . . . It Was You” with Meredith Baxter-Birney and Malcolm McDowell. “Then I went to a girl’s boarding school in 10th grade and started doing all kinds of roles.” Graduating in 1965, she auditioned for Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. “He said, ‘So, you want to act.’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

In “Relentless” (opening Wednesday), Foster plays cop Leo Rossi’s “nurturing, balancing, practical” wife; Judd Nelson is a psychopathic serial killer “giving the police a hard time, as those people are wont to do.” Then comes “Stepfather 2,” with homicidal Terry O’Quinn (Surprise! He survived his multiple-stabbing-and-shooting “death” in the original) cozying up to another victim-family, with Foster as the new wife.

“Obviously,” she says wryly, “this character did not see ‘Stepfather 1.’ ”