THE BIZ

‘I’ve seen her in a million things . . . what is her name?” In Hollywood, there’s an anonymous caste of cast--the ubiquitous character actors whose names only a casting agent can recall. Such obscurity is often the bane of a performer’s existence--most actors “vant to be alone” after they’re famous.

And then there’s Rita Zohar. A former star of Israel’s Yiddish theater, Zohar’s specialty is strong-willed middle-aged women with slight European accents: a friend of the family in “Daniel” (1983), a murderer in “The Lady in White” (1988), semi-regular roles on “St. Elsewhere” and “Cagney & Lacey” and parts in a slew of miniseries. But she has never been on “The Tonight Show,” and you won’t find her in People. She doesn’t go to Hollywood parties or ceremonies, has turned down interviews so often no one asks anymore and won’t do commercials.

“Most people don’t know I’m an actress,” she says. “I do my work, go home and have a normal life.”

Zohar, 47, attributes her distrust of fame to her husband. When she married in 1968, she vowed to her husband, a Mexican-Jewish business man, that her career would never impinge upon their life. After having three children, she resumed acting, but her husband still considered it a less-than-respectable way to earn a living. “We agreed that I would have a normal life,” she says. “I have never regretted that. It kept me sane and healthy.”

But after 20 years in Hollywood (she left Israel in the mid-’60s), Zohar and her husband are becoming more amenable to the idea of fame. Last year, Zohar won the first Israeli equivalent of the Academy Award for best actress for her work in Avraham Heffner’s “Laura Adler’s Last Love Affair,” and lately, she has granted a spate of interviews.

“I had always felt guilty at leaving my homeland,” she says. “This award told me that all was forgiven. But my children are out of the house now, so maybe things are just changing.”