Liv Ullmann Still Playing Her Conscience : Film: In her new movie, ‘The Rose Garden,’ the politically active actress takes on yet another challenging role.

“They say that films are hard to come by when women are at a certain age,” Liv Ullmann says, “But it doesn’t seem so. I have a fantastic time.”

In her new film, “The Rose Garden,” which opens Friday at the Goldwyn Westside Pavilion, Ullmann plays a German lawyer taking on the apparently hopeless case of a concentration camp survivor who has attacked and tried to kill an elderly man in the Hamburg airport.

Directed by Fons Rademakers (“The Assault”) and based partly on fact, “The Rose Garden” is one of the unusual profusion of Holocaust-based films that have come along at year end. Maximilian Schell, unrecognizable beneath gray, thin and tangled hair, is the attacker. The man he has attacked was the commandant of a camp.

Ullmann, invading the wartime past to learn the underlying motivation of the attack, gives the film compassion.

“My last four or five films have involved Jewish themes or characters,” Ullmann says. “For a Lutheran Norwegian, it’s interesting.”

In fact, her recent films have all involved themes of deep social involvement, allowing Ullmann to link the nature of her performances with the compulsions of her personal life.

For more than a decade she has been a member of the International Rescue Committee, which was founded in the late ‘30s by Albert Einstein among others to rescue artists (Marc Chagall was one) from the Nazi terror.

After Christmas, Ullmann will go to Hong Kong to take part in hearings about the forced deportation of Vietnamese boat people back to Vietnam by the British. “It’s mass murder,” Ullmann says.

She also continues to be a spokeswoman for UNICEF, traveling the world to witness the plight of children and then to talk about it to anyone who will listen.

“I do a lot of public speaking,” Ullmann says. “I visit people in their circumstances, and I write and explain my own material based on what I’ve seen.” She finds signs of progress. “Ten years ago less than 10% of the world’s children had been immunized against the major diseases. Now it is more than 70%.

“Ironically, both sides in El Salvador agreed to a cease-fire for two days so children could be immunized. They’ve done it three times now, and the percentage of immunized children is higher in El Salvador than either New York or London.”

Still, thousands of children die of preventable diseases. “The money for immunization is not much, $2.5 billion. That’s a year’s worth of cigarette advertising, or a year of vodka consumption in Russia. It’s just a matter of changing priorities, people asking their governments where the money goes.”

Ullmann, when she is not off making films or serving good causes, lives in Boston with her real estate investor husband, Donald Saunders. She is active there as well, recruited by the Salvation Army to abet their good works. “I visit old people’s homes, shelters, VA hospitals. I’ve seen more of Boston than some of my husband’s friends.”

Recently, she finished shooting a film called “Mind Walk” at Mont-St-Michel in France, based on the New Age writings of Fritjof Capra. John Hurt plays a poet, Sam Waterston a politician. “For the first time, I play a scientist, a subatomic particle physicist,” she says, talking knowledgeably about probability patterns. It was this role as much as any that led her to remark that maturity might not be such a barrier to interesting roles as is supposed.

The cast read for a week in New York before shooting, and Ullmann says the actors were able to create chunks of their own conversation. “I got to say a lot about the state of children in the world,” she notes with satisfaction.

“The Rose Garden,” written by Paul Hengge, puts a fictional bracket around a true story. The Schell character and his two sisters were inmates at the Bullenhuser school in Hamburg, where 20 children were subjected to medical experiments and then, as British troops advanced in the last days of the war, were drugged and hanged.

The school, the experiments, the hangings, the commandant were quite real. The commandant was accused of war crimes but escaped conviction on grounds that he was unfit to stand trial.

“The commandant,” Ullmann says, “is still alive, and in fact he tried to stop the production. He did force the production to use a different name. He may try to stop the film being shown. In a way I hope he does, it will show what the situation is like, still.”

Rademakers shot at the actual Bullenhuser school, where a memorial exhibit to the dead children exists in the basement and a rose garden, established as a memorial to them but now somewhat the worse for neglect, stands in the schoolyard.

“I talked to some of the children about the tragedy, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. When I spoke to some of the elders, they said: ‘Oh, well, it was a long time ago and it was probably exaggerated anyway.’ ”

The attitude, coolly and cruelly dismissive of the past, echoes the extraordinary statement, part of the film’s final crawl, made by the prosecutor when the second trial of the commandant was dismissed. “Beyond the destruction of their lives, no further harm was done to them. . . .” And that was the prosecutor, not the defense attorney.

By midyear Ullmann will be a grandmother. Her daughter, Linn, by Ingmar Bergman, married a Norwegian and now lives in Oslo. To Ullmann’s surprise Bergman, who had not attended Linn’s baptism because he was then rejecting all matters of faith, asked to give his daughter away at the ceremony.

“Afterward,” Ullmann says with amusement, “he took my arm and we walked down the aisle together. It was the wrong way, but at least we did it.

“I think perhaps he is closer to religious observances than he was before.”

Meanwhile, Ullmann continues her diet of testing and generally somber roles. She could use a slightly better balance, she says. “Just once, I’d like to play a loving, funny, sexy, crazy woman. Just once.”