A Jack of All Trades

Before he was was an actor, Anthony Denison was a lot of other things.

“I had all these different professions paying my way through college,” says the New York native, who opens this weekend in Israel Horovitz’s 1971 off-off-Broadway hit “Line” at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. “I was a newspaper editor, a stonemason. I promoted chess and backgammon tournaments, worked in construction, sold insurance and was a bookie--until a Lakers-Knicks game wiped me out one night.”

A continuing education acting class (“the only other choice was photography, and I didn’t have the money for a camera”) hooked him on acting. It was in a 1979 regional staging of “Line” that he met his actress wife, Jennifer Evans. But it wasn’t until Michael Mann in 1987 tapped him to play crime boss Ray Luca on “Crime Story” that Denison’s career took off. “Suddenly it was limousines and ‘What can I get for you?’ ”

After two seasons on “Crime Story” (Denison concedes the series resulted in a flurry of offers for bad-guy roles, “but I don’t worry about that anymore”), he resurfaced last season on “Wiseguy,” filling in for injured series star Ken Wahl as bespectacled OCB agent John Raglin--and recently as Susan Dey’s supportive lover in the cancer drama “I Love You Perfect.”

Newly back from shooting an ABC pilot, “The Company,” in Yugoslavia, Denison’s staging of “Line” (the cast includes his wife and three friends) will benefit the Actors’ Fund of America--with all funds earmarked for actors with AIDS. The play, he says, “is an existential comedy, a metaphor for a many things: compassion, how people lose sight of goals. But it’s never clear what they’re in line for.”

Should we wear our thinking caps? “You could. But you might laugh them off.”