A Shakespearan Conquest for ‘Cheers’ : Casting: British actor Roger Rees is the man who finally seduces Rebecca.

The producers of “Cheers” set out last summer to search for Rebecca’s love interest. A pivotal role. As one gets a great award--an Oscar, a Pulitzer, a Nobel Prize--the highest reward in the legend of “Cheers” is Rebecca, who hasn’t had sex in three years!

And the winner was . . . not Sam Malone (as played by Ted Danson), who has been in heat for her every Thursday night on NBC since “Backseat Becky” (as played by Kirstie Alley) took over managership of the bar in 1987.

No, the real winner was . . . Robin Colcord, the high-style, high-finance entrepreneur in the Donald Trumpian tradition. And as the role evolves, he will consummate his romance with Rebecca in the back seat of his stretch limo.

“I never thought I’d see the day,” Sam marvels in the two-part episode, entitled “Finally!,” beginning Jan. 25. “First the Berlin Wall, and now this.”

The man portraying Robin is Roger Rees. It was odd casting, since Rees is less known for debonair, seductive screen acting than for his work in the theater. Most notably, he won a Broadway Tony Award for his triumphant performance as the title character in the more-than-eight-hour Royal Shakespeare Company rendition of Charles Dickens’ “The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.”

The Wales-born, South London-raised Rees, 44, has done many of the classics, including 150 performances of “Hamlet.” He’s performed “Twelfth Night” eight times: “I’ve played every man’s part except Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio--so I want to move into the women’s parts now,” he said.

He once did a solo show, “Revelation--The Book”--performing the entire last book of the Bible.

“Cheers” would seem like a piece of cake.

During an interview off the Cheers bar set on the Paramount lot, he shook his head in the negative. “It’s quite hard to learn some of this,” he explained. “Because every day it changes little by little.

“Just before you go onto the set Tuesday evening (during taping with a live audience), you get white pages, which are rewrites, and you have to learn whole speeches again, don’t you? And you learn them as you’re being introduced to the studio audience. And you think, ‘I don’t know these words. . . .’ ”

Rees came to the role via “Hapgood,” the Tom Stoppard spy puzzle that played the Doolittle Theatre as part of the Ahmanson season. He was playing a Soviet particle physicist with a really heavy accent, “and they thought I would be perfect to play an Englishman on ‘Cheers.’ ”

“Cheers” casting director Jeff Greenberg mentioned the show’s interest in a corporate-raider type character to Ahmanson publicist Joyce Friedman, who then mentioned Rees.

Greenberg recalled the very hot day of the audition: “We were sitting around in shorts--when Rees came in with his dark Armani suit. The producers knew right away that they had their Robin. Robin would not wear shorts.”

Rees wanted a break from theater--and he didn’t discount the possibility of making some Hollywood money. “The classical actor in England makes roughly the equivalent of a bus driver,” he explained.

Rees had done some but not much work in Hollywood; he played the Peter Bogdanovich-type character in “Star 80,” the Dorothy Stratten biofilm directed by Bob Fosse.

Now that he has moved here, he’s getting other work. He just played a twisted villain on an episode of ABC’s “Young Riders” and finished, among other writings, a screenplay of a two-character play that he wrote with Eric Elice, “Double Double.” The script is now with the money-raising people.

He’s also working on “trying to set up some projects in theater here.” Whenever he meets locals and talks about theater ideas, workshop training and the like, he said, the interest “gushes out of people. . . . All this thing that L.A. doesn’t have any love for the theater isn’t true.”

He’s “very interested in working with American actors in the Jacobean, Elizabethan area, the thing that I’m particularly known for,” he said. “I want to start a completely democratic group of people doing that sort of thing here.”

Just what is democratic theater? “I worked a lot with (director) Trevor Nunn, who--now he makes millions of pounds and doesn’t seem to be very democratic at all--but on the rehearsal floor and through my whole association with him--long before ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ like the ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Comedy of Errors’ and ‘Three Sisters’--there was a wonderful community feeling in the theater. The experience was rather like not being directed but being guided.”

He also is fascinated in theater that reflects “what happens on the streets, and I think a very good touchstone to what I’m talking about is when you go into McDonald’s and look at the polycultural assembly there, just the different people you meet there of all different sorts and ethnic backgrounds. This seems to be a wonderful town for that.”

In Bristol he ran a black theater, Company 3. He explained, “We did a black ‘Julius Caesar’ in which the predominant accent was Caribbean. This offends many people, you know. I also had a Chinese Marc Anthony. I also managed--this caused a great shock--I also got some white guys in it as well!”

Some dispute came from “the sense of scholarship in Shakespeare,” he said, “that people perhaps shouldn’t be talking in a West Indian accent when they were playing Brutus of ‘Julius Caesar.’ One has to remind them that Shakespeare, too, was writing about Italy and he was using English actors!

“And it’s interesting to think of Rome at that time as probably as polycultural as McDonald’s.”

For someone with his theater background, how tough can a sitcom be?

“I think people don’t even think this is acting when they watch it,” he said. “But even though the characters are very similar to the actors who play them, it’s very skillful acting. Ted (Danson) seems to be so relaxed and so nonchalant. But it’s not easy to be filmed by four cameras as you walk across the floor. It’s a great skill--and to be funny too!”

Despite his resume, back in his salad days he seemed a slow learner. He had been doing walk-on roles for some time at the Royal Shakespeare Company when Nunn cast him for a two-line part.

“I got so nervous,” Rees recalled. “I played a lord who came on right at the very end of the play. I had a little speech and I became like semaphoric. It became like just a collection of syllables. And it came out in any order, so they had to take it away from me.”

He still has ambitions to do more of the Shakespeare canon: “I want to play King Lear, Macbeth, Benedict, Coriolanus. I wouldn’t mind doing Hamlet again. Well, I’m a little old. Perhaps I can rub Vaseline on the audience’s eyes. . . . “