<i> Femme Fatale </i> Checks In to ‘Grand Hotel’ : Stage: Liliane Montevecchi unpacks her glamour and her act in the Tony Award-winning musical version of the Greta Garbo film classic.

Garbo is a hard act to follow, but Liliane Montevecchi does it well in the Tony Award-winning “Grand Hotel, the Musical,” now at Kennedy Center after a New York run. She wears her glamour like a sable boa in the role of the femme fatale Garbo played in “Grand Hotel,” the 1932 MGM movie taken from Vicki Baum’s dark novel about Berlin in the ominous glitter of 1928.

Montevecchi, who won a Tony nomination for her performance as the fading ballet star in the Broadway show, enjoys being the only original cast member now on stage in the Kennedy Center production: “It’s a relief. The critics cannot compare me to the one on Broadway because I am the one on Broadway. You know, critics just adore to compare, and now they don’t have a chance with me.

“I did (the role) for a year on Broadway; so it’s more part of me than (the other roles for) the other members of the cast.”

Tommy Tune, who won Tonys as director and choreographer of “Grand Hotel,” has said that “it’s the dancing that moves the show. It’s one big piece of choreography.” Montevecchi’s performance seems especially important for that reason. She brings grace and fluidity to it as a dancer and poignancy as an actress.

She says the role of Elizaveta Grushinskaya is something like herself, “except that I would never be as desperate as she is. My outlook on life is not as serious as hers. She thinks she’s over the hill; nobody loves her anymore; she’s finished. I would never think that. I would never let anybody else think that. But at the end, I’m like her when she finds love, and she’s a little girl again. . . . Life has come back to her.”

Those gorgeous costumes, the floor-length cocoon of mink, all that soigne glitter of velvet and sequins and silk--she says are all hot and heavy under the stage lights. “Yes, it’s hot, but I don’t care; it’s so beautiful to wear. Costume designer Santo Loquasto does a great job. What talent!”

She remembers that in Paris, “in the ‘Folies Bergere,’ I used to wear 50-kilo (110-pound-plus) costumes. I used to have a cape coming down the stairs; the cape was unfolding. I had 26 steps to come down. When I arrived down the stairs, my cape was covering the whole stage, and I had eight boys taking it away. So this feels like a feather--what I’m wearing here.”

She was born in Paris to a French mother and Italian father. What was her childhood like?

“Ballet,” she says. She grew up en point, took four-hour daily ballet lessons from the time she was 9, as well as attending school. With that kind of discipline and talent, she became prima ballerina of the Roland Petit’s celebrated ballet company in Paris at 21. “And then I stopped dancing.”

Why?

“I went to Hollywood and became a movie star.”

Among her films: “Daddy Long Legs” with Fred Astaire; “King Creole,” with Elvis Presley, and “The Young Lions,” with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. She and Astaire became friends through a mutual friend, Astaire’s choreographer Hermes Pan, at whose home they often dined. She says of Astaire: “He was a gentle man, very kind, a grand seigneur.”

She had made the leap from ballet to movies to the “Folies Bergere,” then made the final and perhaps most difficult leap: to Broadway. She arrived in New York, immediately won the starring role in the musical “Nine,” and won a Tony Award for it that year. She decided to stay.

“The gentleness of the American people touched me a lot. That made a difference--and the generosity. If they like someone, they don’t care where they’re from. And I was very touched by this gesture of their taking me into their arms.”