Annie Potts: Deep in the Heart of ‘Texasville’ : Movies: The actress hopes the sequel to ‘The Last Picture Show’ will work the same magic for her that the original did for its stars.

“There’s only three or four things to know about you,” Annie Potts, playing the part of Karla Jackson in the new movie “Texasville,” snaps at her husband. “But there’s a million things to know about me!”

“I can have a tongue like a machete,” Potts says, laughing over the appropriateness of her character in the film, who is described by “Texasville” director and writer Peter Bogdanovich as “a feisty, hopeful, strong woman who has put up with a lot and is ready to put up with more.” It is, in fact, a description that also fits Potts.

“Texasville” is the sequel to “The Last Picture Show” the acclaimed 1971 film--based, as is the sequel, on a Larry McMurtry novel--that launched the careers of many of its young stars, among them Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Randy Quaid and Jeff Bridges--not to mention Bogdanovich himself, who was hailed by one critic as the “new Orson Welles.” After 13 years in the film industry yet far better known for her role of Mary Jo Shivley on the CBS-TV series “Designing Women,” Potts, 37, hopes “Texasville,” will work the same magic for her.

Reared on a 250-acre farm near Franklin, Ky., Potts is all Southern gentility this day, arranging roses from the garden in the newly remodeled kitchen of her four-bedroom, sunlight-filled 1938 Spanish home, high on a hill overlooking Glendale.

“It’s a strong, wonderful role,” says Potts, of her character in “Texasville.” “I was no fool to the fact that this was an extraordinary role offered to me and I knew what it might mean if I were able to do my best.

“I’ve always been a person with enormous energy and, God knows, I needed it all making ‘Texasville.’ ”

For 15 weeks, Potts worked three days a week on “Designing Women” and four in Archer City, Tex. “I’d finish in Burbank about midnight, catch the 1 a.m. flight to Dallas, fly all night and work 16 hours the next day.” Despite “basically no sleep,” she believes “it is the best work I have ever done.”

Potts started acting at 12, at the summer camp she attended in the North Carolina mountains. After her graduation from the local high school she went to France to study drama at the University of Nice, but ended up at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., where she was graduated with a degree in drama.

Then Potts was married and she and her husband, Steve Schwartz, moved to Santa Fe where she took a job with the New Mexico State Theatre and tried to save enough money to go to New York. On the second day of touring with a show at junior and senior high schools in the Northwest, she was nearly killed in a highway accident.

“We came up over a small rise in the road--it was drizzling like it almost always is there, and coming down our side of the highway were three cars drag racing. The left lane was full and they hit us head-on. It was five days before my 21st birthday--Oct. 23, 1973.”

The drivers of all three cars were drunk, Potts says, and walked away from the accident. She wasn’t as lucky. “Every bone in my body was broken below the waist, except my left femur,” she says with a grimace. “My husband broke both of his legs and lost one of them. I came very close to losing my right leg.”

When they recovered, Potts and Schwartz moved to Los Angeles where her career finally got a jump-star with the help of actor Roddy McDowall, with whom she worked in a road show production of “Charlie’s Aunt.”

“Roddy McDowall is the reason I began to work in this town,” she says. “When we got back, he helped me meet casting directors to get work.”

McDowall, today a close friend, calls Potts an “original” and compares her to the ‘30s and ‘40s star Jean Arthur. “From the very first time I heard her read, I was very enthusiastic about her,” McDowall says. “We were really taken by her extraordinary originality and native talent.”

Potts has worked more or less regularly since then, with parts in such films as “Corvette Summer,” “King of the Gypsies,” “Heartaches,” “Pretty in Pink” and “Crimes of Passion.” Her pre-”Texasville” work is perhaps best known for the antic receptionist in the two “Ghostbusters” films. “There is even a doll of me,” she says, not too happily. “It’s quite horrible. Her head spins around and her eyes pop out!”

Potts and Schwartz divorced after about five years. Still an actor, Schwartz directs Santa Fe’s Shakespeare in the Park festival. Potts has remarried twice since--to Scott Senechal, an assistant director, with whom she had a son, 9-year-old Clay, and to her current husband, cinematographer Jim Hayman.

She says the accident was, in part, responsible for her focus on her career: “I came so very close to losing my life. I’ve always been ambitious, but it certainly fanned the flames of my desire. I’ve never thought of ambition as a dirty word.”

Potts believes it was her upbringing that created her ambition and the strength to fight for her career.

“And there is not a shortage of strong women in my family,” she says, adding that this made finding Karla’s character a snap. “We lived down on this farm in the country and my father would be away on business overnight now and then. We three little girls (she and her two sisters) would hear things in the middle of the night and go down and tug on Mama’s nightgown and say we heard something outside.

“Without missing a beat, first she’d reach up on the back of her bed and get her Kool cigarettes, get up, put on her peignoir, go to the front-hall closet, get a shotgun, go to the back door, kick it open with one hip, stick the barrel out and pump about five rounds into the night. Then she’d say, ‘OK, y’all, go back to bed now.’ Which we did, feeling quite safe.”

She says that she got along “very well” with Shepherd on the “Texasville” set and that she is still in awe of Bridges. “I never worked with the like of him as an actor, he’s completely focused on the work. You never see a seam--it’s like Spencer Tracy.”

Potts has her fingers crossed that “Texasville” will prove to be a milestone in her career. Certainly, her performance has been singled out for praise in many early reviews.

“I do feel that I’m coming into my own,” she says. “I don’t think it would have made me very happy if I’d had the information 15 years ago that it would take as long as it has. But I don’t worry about having my name above the title . . . when your work is respected the other trappings come. I want my work to be good, and that will come,” she says.