Look Who’s Funny : Kirstie Alley used to see scripts for ice queens and aliens. Then the laughs she got on ‘Cheers’ opened the door to movie comedy.

Racks of colorful dresses, business suits, pants, blouses and night gowns with tags from Saks Fifth Avenue, Bullocks, Nordstrom and Neiman-Marcus sit baking in the sun outside Kirstie Alley’s trailer on the Warner Hollywood lot. Inside, between scenes of Carl Reiner’s lastest film, “Sibling Rivalry,” Alley jokes and fusses with her wardrobe people, there to outfit her for the sequel to last fall’s blockbuster “Look Who’s Talking,” which will begin production just as she completes her work in Reiner’s comedy.

“They wanted me to start on “Look Who’s Talking II” in Vancouver the day after I wrapped here,” Alley says in her distinctively raspy voice. “I told them, ‘No way.’ So now I think I have one whole day off to fly up there.” She pauses, setting up the joke as she’s learned to do over the past three seasons as the neurotic and obsessively chaste bar manager on NBC’s durable hit series, “Cheers.” “I’m a really big star now, you know. I really do have that much power.”

The ultimate aphrodisiac for most actors, though, is not power, but feeling wanted. And Kirstie Alley, the 35-year-old star from Kansas whom Ted Danson describes as “a biker chick crossed with an earth mother,” is a wanted woman. Alley may not have been able to finagle many days off this summer, but the directors of both “Sibling Rivalry” and “Look Who’s Talking II” wanted her badly enough to shuffle their shooting schedules to accommodate her busy acting life.

She shot Reiner’s movie, which will open in October, during May and June. She shot the sequel to her one and only blockbuster, scheduled for a Christmas release, right after that. And with a break only long enough for an appearance in Maria Shriver’s recent prime-time celebrity special, Alley has already returned for another eight months of “Cheers.”

Despite a cocaine addiction that she kicked before coming to Hollywood 11 years ago, despite never having acted in a comedy before “Cheers” and despite the overwhelming failure of her last film, “Madhouse,” Alley is, according to Reiner, about to burst into the elite ranks of comic actresses. Earlier this month, as if to prove his point, Alley received her first Emmy nomination as best actress in a comedy series.

All this for a woman who could have ruined “Cheers” when she replaced Shelley Long in 1987 after forgettable roles as a sultry alien in the movie “Star Trek II,” an antebellum beauty in the TV miniseries “North and South” and an uptight goody-two-shoes teacher in “Summer School.” But the much-beloved sitcom survived, and even thrived, with Alley managing the bar. Last year, “Cheers” won the Emmy for best comedy series; this past season it ended up the third most popular program on TV behind only “Roseanne” and “The Cosby Show.” Then, last fall, Alley teamed with John Travolta and director Amy Heckerling in one of the year’s biggest and perhaps most surprising smashes, “Look Who’s Talking,” which earned nearly $140 million.

“She’s very graceful and ebullient and she’s funny,” said Reiner, taking a break from a newspaper crossword puzzle while waiting for his crew to light the next shot. “Off the set she cracks everybody up. She’s a real cutup. She’s always thinking funny, and with people like that, you can really use them and embellish upon their creativity. She has everything every comedian has had from Carole Lombard to Jean Arthur. I’m really going to miss her on my next picture.

“Is this too much?” he asks, interrupting his foray into hyperbole. “It’s not too much because it’s the same thing I tell my wife. Just watch Kirstie for a few minutes. You’ll see it.”

As if on cue, Kirstie Alley performs. First, with co-star Bill Pullman, she does several takes of a scene in which they argue over who is best equipped to remove a condom from a man who died in the throes of passion. As Reiner yells “Cut!” for the final time, Alley leaps onto the mannequin corpse as if jumping on a runaway horse and pretends to make raucous love to it. Most everyone on the set doubles over with laughter. Reiner rushes Alley to the playback monitor so she can witness her lusty shenanigans herself, and the entire set erupts in belly laughs again.

“She’s outrageous,” Danson said. “She has this wonderful combination of being incredibly vulnerable and extremely outrageous. She knows no fear. Most of us walk around concerned about how people perceive us, but she is totally unconcerned about that. She’s one of those people who is not afraid to do anything in life, and her acting, I think, is becoming more and more like her life.”

Alley is afraid of photographers, actually--so concerned about the way she’ll look on camera or in stills that the “Sibling Rivalry” crew built a special horseshoe-shaped light, covered with blue plastic gel, that fits around the movie camera and casts her in soft, pretty hues. When a photographer arrived on the set to snap her picture for this story, she insisted that he use her special light.

In a way, it’s odd that Alley, at this point in her career, would go to such extremes to manage her image. Of course, no actor, no matter how much they protest, is free from that deadly sin called vanity. They have to be at least a little vain to get up on stage in the first place. But it was Alley’s looks--that big brown hair, those catlike blue eyes, that hard biker-chick/ice-queen attitude--that prevented any director from considering her for a comedy role before James Burrows took a chance on her in “Cheers.”

“I always wanted to do comedy films because those were the movies I loved growing up--Doris Day and Rock Hudson and Tony Randall and movies like ‘Pillow Talk.’ I loved those romantic comedies,” Alley says. “But everyone thought I was so serious and such a tight-ass. My agent would say, ‘Would you consider Kirstie for this role?’ and they would go, ‘Oh yeah, right, she’s real (expletive) funny.’ They don’t believe you can do it.

“I mean, let’s face it, we’re not dealing with rocket scientists here. If someone has not seen you do it before, they assume that you can’t do it. I think that they forget that actors are people that act. They want to see you only in one way, and I don’t know if that’s based on your looks or what, but it’s like after I did ‘Star Trek,’ I was offered every alien part you could possibly fathom. I was the girl who played aliens. So that’s why I’ve avoided anything even remotely connected to sci-fi.”

Alley admits that she took “Cheers,” even though she was relishing a bunch of movie offers at the time like her girl-in-trouble part in “Shoot to Kill,” hoping that it would launch her into the world of comedy films. “Don’t most actors do that?” she asks. “I mean, the ideal scene is features. But ‘Cheers’ is the best learning experience I could have ever had. I always had an instinct for comedy because I knew I was funny in my life, but I had no idea about props or physical comedy or even how loud I should speak. Jimmy Burrows would give me little bits--a little shtick here and there--and that’s how I learned.”

Burrows, “Cheers’ ” principal director and one of three executive producers, said that they made a conscious effort not to hire a “comedienne” to replace Long when she decided to jump full-time into features. He had seen Alley in a production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Mark Taper and was struck by her “hot and sultry” presence and her “great voice.” And, Burrows said, the original idea for the character of Rebecca, the bar’s new boss, was that of a tough, beautiful martinet. The humor would emanate from Sam’s growing instability over her cool and unwavering rejection of his sexual advances. They didn’t think they needed someone already facile in the fine art of sitcom humor, and Alley, even though the characterization perpetuated the image of her as the hard, sultry vixen, fit the bill.

But Burrows said that from her first show, Alley surprised them with her own scatterbrained neuroses. In that first episode, Burrows said, Alley was supposed to enter her office, but she had a terrible time just opening the door. “From that minute,” Burrows recalled, “I realized that there was something to be tapped there. So we started to write to that neurosis, and she became funnier and funnier.”

What makes Alley a sought-after comic actress, Burrows said, “is that you don’t see it coming. She’s got that hair and that face, and you don’t think a woman who looks like that should be funny. And yet she is. Comedy is surprise, and comedy coming from this sultry woman surprises you and makes you laugh that much harder.”

Danson admitted he was nervous about having to work with a new actress and learn a “new dance step” after his partnership with Long had proven so successful. But Alley, he said, plunged into the show with a reckless “chutzpah” and “really did breathe new life” into it.

And, her calculated professional moves paying off big, she breathed life into her film career as well.

“Cheers” helped her get “Look Who’s Talking” and myriad other offers, Alley said, and “Look Who’s Talking,” her first leading film role and a surprise bonanza for Tri-Star, raised her salary. But in the media hoopla over John Travolta’s “comeback” and director Heckerling’s return to the acclaim she enjoyed with 1982’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” Alley was largely ignored.

In an interview from the production office in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she was about to begin directing the sequel, Heckerling said that Alley appeals to audiences because “without being weak, she has a certain vulnerability. And without being gross, she can be funny. A lot of the time, women who are funny are not attractive or feminine. She has all of that and she’s funny.”

But the director bristled at reminders of all the stories in the press last fall slighting Alley, focusing instead on the “comebacks” of Travolta and herself. “Where were we before this supposed comeback?” she asked, calling that kind of attention “something that just makes you angry.” When pressed about Alley’s role in the success of the film, Heckerling sarcastically replied: “Let’s see, 3% was the script, 70% was Kirstie, 12% was John. . . .”

Alley is more composed when discussing the media’s skepticism over her ability to bring in the masses. After all, there’s no denying that with “Cheers” she stepped into television’s equivalent of a souped-up Ferrari that had already roared its way into the Nielsen Top 5. On “Look Who’s Talking,” she was teamed with a man who once was one of the world’s biggest movie stars, but the ad campaign focused on the film’s gimmick: a talking fetus/baby with voice supplied by Bruce Willis.

With a not-so-stellar cast and a not-so-clever gimmick, “Madhouse” flopped.

“I have no problem with a quiet, quiet success,” said Alley, who is married to former “Hardy Boys” star Parker Stevenson and is now pregnant with their first child. On “Cheers” this season, her condition will be written into the plot. “In the first place, my part in ‘Look Who’s Talking’ isn’t, like, this great acting feat. We’re not talking ‘Sophie’s Choice’ here. I think that the goal, especially if you’re a woman, is to set yourself up with successes, however they come, so that you can get the kind of movie you want to do green-lighted and into production. It’s much harder for a woman to get a movie into production.

“Statistics are that women’s movies just don’t make as much money as men’s movies, and this is a business that is about making money, right? Even when a woman has a huge hit, she always seems to have a hard time getting any credit for the success. I notice that in all of those big Spielberg movies, none of those women were ever catapulted anywhere. Maybe if you could get a woman character that was Rambette, then you’d have something. But who wants to play Rambette? Men are silly. They’ll play anything.”

What Alley really wants to play is a small-town Kansas trailer park queen. “I’m always playing someone who is from a higher income level than I knew growing up. A little more sophisticated, a little better educated than I am,” said Alley, who, to quell deep-seated insecurities, developed a cocaine addiction while working as an interior decorator in her hometown of Wichita, Kan., in the late 1970s. She kicked her habit with the help of a cold-turkey rehab program before moving to Los Angeles to become an actress. She is now the national spokesperson for Narconon--the program she credits with saving her life.

“I have more of a handle on that kind of babe from Kansas than all these other women I’m always playing, and I do have a real desire to act that, to show that side of me.”

On this night, though, Alley was ready to show off that wild side Danson finds so charming. With the ease of a practiced movie star, she ushered her young personal assistant off to hire a car to take her to a private party for rock star David Bowie. “Make sure it’s a town car, not a limousine,” she called after him, suddenly remembering her high-profile celebrity-activist participation in environmental causes. “It doesn’t look too good to preach all this concern for the environment and then show up in some superstretch limo.”

Then, turning to a female member of the “Sibling Rivalry” crew, she wistfully revealed her secret desires for the evening. “I hope Billy Idol is there. I just want to sit there and stare at him.”