SHORT TAKES : Actress Identifies With Role

Actress Christine Lahti said she empathized with the pain suffered by the woman she recently portrayed in a romantic comedy about a couple who can’t have children.

Lahti said she and her husband, director Thomas Schlamme, also had trouble conceiving their first child.

“As satisfying a career as I’ve had, I still felt that sense of failure when we were encountering some difficulty,” Lahti said.

“It’s all so ingrained in us,” she said. “It was a painful realization. ‘You’re not a real woman unless you’ve had a baby’ sounds so absurd, but it was still an issue for me.”

Lahti and her husband recently had their first baby, Willie.

In “Funny About Love,” Lahti plays a chef who meets, falls in love and marries a cartoonist, played by veteran comic actor Gene Wilder.

Lahti’s character, Meg, wants desperately to be a mother and is devastated when she discovers she’s infertile.