Ron Silver Has His Own Kind of Reversal of Fortune : Movies: He majored in history and languages and was on his way to becoming an intelligence agent. But then he began studying acting.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who won an acquittal for Claus von Bulow, had his picture in the paper the other day in another context. It was double-take time because he bears such an amazing resemblance to Ron Silver, who played him in “Reversal of Fortune.” (Or, of course, vice versa.)

“If I had as much publicity as he does, I’d be a big star,” Silver said with an admiring laugh a few days ago. Silver was in Los Angeles finishing an Arthur Hiller film, presently titled “Married to It,” in which he plays Cybill Shepherd’s husband.

Unlike Jeremy Irons, who played Von Bulow but had no wish to meet him, Silver spent time with Dershowitz and his family and watched him in action in the classroom at Harvard.

It’s always tough to portray a living person, doubly so in this case. “He’s a very public person,” Silver says. “A lot of people know what he looks like, what he talks like. His persona is important. It was difficult because it was based on his book. So it was his perception of himself. It was difficult because his son Elon was associate producer of the film. Need I go on?” Silver asked, laughing.

“There were certain constraints,” he adds, but even so he was given a lot of room for interpretation. On the other hand, Silver says, it wasn’t like doing a script based on a novel, as with “Enemies, a Love Story,” another major outing for Silver, which was drawn from an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.

“I get a tremendous amount of help from reading the novel. If it’s by a fine writer--a Singer, a Doctorow, a Philip Roth--there’s so much they know and understand about human character and behavior that they can really do a lot of your work for you.”

On his own opinion on Von Bulow’s guilt or innocence, Silver says slyly: “I think Jeremy is completely innocent of an wrongdoing. If anybody asks me, I can say without any question that Jeremy did not do it. Actually, I don’t know how I felt about Von Bulow and I don’t have any feelings about Von Bulow.”

Filming took place amid some ongoing civil litigation about the case. “There were lawyers on the set every day, concerned about what can be said and what can’t be said. If you wanted to change a line, there were calls to both coasts and to England.

“They simply didn’t want us to meet Von Bulow. It didn’t matter to me. The only thing that mattered to me was Jeremy Irons’ Von Bulow.”

You have the feeling that Dershowitz, voluble and ceaselessly energetic, was not far from Silver’s own lively and enthusiastically opinionated persona. Not so the Holocaust survivor, suddenly equipped with not one or two but three wives in Paul Mazursky’s “Enemies.”

“I don’t shy away from provocations and I like to get involved in the fray. I’m fairly passionate about a lot of things, personally, politically and professionally. And to portray somebody as non-expressive and as much of a cipher as that man had to be--what a stretch.

“I had three brilliant actresses whirling around me doing arias and my job was almost to disappear. I wanted to make the audience say to themselves, ‘What do these three women see in this guy?’ ”

The character, Silver says, “never exploded, he imploded. He was devastated.” But Silver adds that he tries to find something positive and constructive in anybody he plays, which was tough amid the bleakness of “Enemies.” Yet there was something.

“This man tried to become alive. He tried to understand himself as being alive by making love, because when you’re making love you know you’re not dead.”

Silver majored in history and languages at the University of Buffalo and then won a Department of Defense scholarship and stipend to continue his study of Chinese in Taiwan. He then spent time in what he calls a kind of pre-intelligence field training, visiting Vietnam, Cambodia, India and the Soviet Union (where he was briefly arrested).

He anticipated a job in government when he returned, but no job emerged. He had dallied with acting at Buffalo and after his travels he began studying acting with Herbert Berghof and Lee Strasberg. “I was doing scenes with girls from Oklahoma with legs up to heaven. Glorious!” Silver says.

“My girlfriend, who has since become my wife, said, ‘How come every time you’re rehearsing a scene, it’s with a girl, never a man?’ I said, ‘Sweetheart, look at the literature. They simply don’t exist. Other than “The Odd Couple,” which has been done to death, there are no good scenes between two men.’ That ruse did not last very long.”

Silver, now 44, made his first big impression in “El Grande de Coca-Cola” and moved to Los Angeles for the show in 1975. He and his wife were married here and stayed for nine years. (“I’m not one of those L.A.-bashers from New York. I loved it out here. I still do.”) But, after some early successes in television, there was little work, and Los Angeles is no place not to be seen as successful, he says.

He returned to New York and did a lot of stage work, including “Hurly Burly,” “Social Security” and “Speed-the-Plow,” in which he co-starred with Madonna and for which he won a Tony and a Drama Desk award as best actor. He co-starred with Anne Bancroft in the 1984 film “Garbo Talks” and made a major impression in “Enemies, a Love Story.”

“Thirty or 40 years ago if you wanted to work with the best directors and actors in America you went on stage. . . . Today, if you want to work with Marty Scorsese or Francis Coppola or Norman Jewison, you better work in films. If you want to work with the best actors, the De Niros, the Hoffmans, the Meryl Streeps and Glenn Closes, you better be working in films.”

He’s been very lucky, Silver says. “I would love to think it’s a meritocracy, but I don’t think I believe that. There’s really a lot of luck involved. . . . I am ready now to do a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael J. Fox. I want to be in a film that makes $200 million. Enough with the reviews and critical acclaim!”