One Man’s Lasting Impressions : Stage: Decades ago, Charles Pierce left the Pasadena Playhouse to launch his career. Now he’s back with his famed cabaret act, portraying legendary screen actresses.

He arrived at the Pasadena Playhouse when he was 20 years old, wide-eyed and ready to conquer the world of stage and screen.

Now, 44 years later, Charles Pierce has returned--but his wide eyes are highlighted by shadow and mascara.

“It’s a little bit eerie to be here,” said the 64-year-old Pierce, who has made his mark impersonating Hollywood’s most glamorous female celebrities. “It’s exciting to be back where I started, but it’s also a bit ghostly. It evokes a lot of memories.”

Pierce, who lives in North Hollywood, retired less than a year ago. But when Bette Davis, his trademark character, died last October, he was deluged with calls to tour once more.

Although he said he is tired of traveling around the country with suitcases, props and wardrobe, Pierce brought his famous act out of the closet, revamped it and gave it a new name: “The Legendary Ladies of the Silver Screen, All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing . . . All Dead.”

The show has received rave reviews in New York and San Francisco, with critics in the two cities calling Pierce “the best,” “the dean of male actresses” and a “brilliant nightclub performer.”

His cabaret act, to open at the Pasadena Playhouse’s Balcony Theater on Tuesday night, features such Pierce staples as Davis, Mae West, Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson. The show runs until Aug. 12.

Even off stage, Pierce constantly evokes the women in his act, shifting in and out of character. His blue-gray eyes light up when he tells a new joke or an old one: “I feel like a million. . . . But I’ll take them 10 at a time,” he quipped in his best Mae West, pretending with a touch of melodrama to brush aside a fallen strand from his closely cropped, slightly thinning hair.

During the 36 years Pierce has been playing Hollywood leading ladies, little has changed in his act, save his audience, and the girdle he bought a few years back to hide a growing paunch.

Sitting recently on the sun-splashed balcony of the Pasadena Playhouse, Pierce recalled the circuitous route that has taken him back this week to the Spanish-style theater. When he first thought of being an entertainer, he never imagined the job would be a drag--literally.

“I was 14 years old and saw an ad in Theater Arts Magazine,” said Pierce, a native of Watertown, N.Y. “I wrote away and they sent me a brochure that showed students on this very balcony studying their scripts. It showed them in makeup class, in dance class. There was no doubt in my mind about what I was going to do.”

After working as a radio announcer during high school and for several years afterward, Pierce headed West to attend the Playhouse’s acting school.

“I was absorbed in the thought of coming to the Pasadena Playhouse to become an actor,” Pierce said. “For two years this playhouse was like an ivory tower. The world did not exist outside these walls.”

After acting school, Pierce bounced between his old radio job in Watertown, summer stock in Newport, R.I., and the Playhouse, where he played Marley’s ghost in “A Christmas Carol” and gave solo readings in the Balcony Theater.

By 1952 he was doing monologues and stand-up comedy at the Cabaret Concert on Sunset Boulevard. “We didn’t get paid,” Pierce said. “A lot of actors and actresses went there. They were waiting for that big break.”

It was in those early years that Pierce began to develop a style that critics say sets him apart from other impersonators. Rather than rely on costume to create the illusion, Pierce is a master of more subtle forms of mimicry, such as facial expressions, hand movements and inflections in the voices of the movie idols he has studied.

At the same time, Pierce never lets his audience forget that there is an actor behind the mask. Indeed, one of his trademarks is his ability to seamlessly weave out-of-character remarks into the campy tapestry of his act.

Eventually, he found his way to the Club LaVie in Altadena, where he received his first paycheck for performing. At the time, he worked in a pantomime’s black shirt and black pants, using props to realize his characters.

“I’d use a leopard stole, a boa, a hat, but I wasn’t in drag,” Pierce said, his hands moving in a welter as he pretended to don each prop again. “I didn’t even think about wearing drag.”

It was at Club LaVie that Pierce started to perfect his voices, male and female: Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Jack Benny, Bette Davis and Eleanor Roosevelt. He wrote his own material, satirizing the actors and actresses who starred in the great movies of the day.

“If you hadn’t seen ‘African Queen,’ ‘Sunset Boulevard’ or ‘Shane,’ you wouldn’t know what I was talking about,” he said.

After doing the show in Altadena, Pierce packed up his bon mots and took them across the country to the Echo Club in Miami Beach.

Although it was illegal in Florida to cross-dress in the early 1960s, Pierce continued doing his act using the props that simply suggested his characters. He would prowl the thrift shops for a cigarette holder or a glittery dress to slip into over his pants. “I did that camp wardrobe act for a long time,” Pierce said.

Even in progressive San Francisco, where Pierce next took his act to the Gilded Cage, impersonating women in full costume was something that evolved over time.

“It wasn’t until the mid ‘60s that I began to do full female impersonations,” Pierce said. “High heels, falsies, makeup . . . it was considered much more outrageous at the time.”

His was a nightclub act, done mostly for gay audiences, and theater presentations were “few and far between.”

Although things have changed since he first began doing his act, Pierce said his show still shocks some people. “With ‘Tootsie’ and ‘La Cage aux Folles,’ it’s been more accepted,” he explained. “It’s not considered outrageous like it used to be, but it can still outrage some people.”

Pierce, who has hung up his gowns for good several times since the mid-1980s in the hope of playing character roles in television and movies, said that while he is tired of traveling, he never tires of his ladies.

“I used to think when Bette Davis goes, there goes my act,” Pierce said. “But she’s larger than life. I’d like to do her on Broadway--I’d like to play Broadway before everything is tucked away for good.”