Lenny Henry --The Man in the Irony Mask : Movies: The British comedian finds the transition from black to white for his role in ‘True Identity’ an illuminating experience.

The idea of racial transformation is not new to the movies. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, “Pinky” and “Imitation of Life” explored the myth of the Tragic Mulatto, and in director Melvin Van Peebles’ 1970 “Watermelon Man,” Godfrey Cambridge starts the movie in whiteface, but awakens one day to discover he’s black. He begins to realize, with painful rapidity, that the world treats him differently.

Touchstone Pictures’ “True Identity” taps the same metaphoric vein. Its plot centers on Miles Pope, a struggling African-American actor played by Lenny Henry, an actor best known in England for “The Lenny Henry Show,” his hugely successful half-hour comedy show, which airs, in cycles on the Bravo cable network. Directed by Charles Lane (whose 1988 silent black-and-white film, “Sidewalk Stories,” was compared to Truffaut’s “Small Change” and Chaplin’s “The Little Tramp”), the movie’s racial comedy of errors reminds viewers that many black Americans cultivate two personae in order to function effectively in the world.

“Putting on your professional face, I think that’s what blacks do when they go out into the world of business--particularly in the media,” Henry says. The tall actor furrows his brow for a moment. “I know there’s another film, ‘Living Large’ (directed by Michael Schultz), that addresses this, where the black guy becomes a newscaster, and finds himself becoming more and more Caucasian as he goes along. I think that’s a legitimate fact. Black people do kind of transform themselves when they’re going out into the wide world, where they have to come into contact with white people on a daily basis.”

In fact, that’s not so very different from life in Great Britain, Henry acknowledges. “You know, there’s that thing they tell you when you’re little: ‘If you’re black, you’ve got to prove you’re twice as good as the white guy just to be accepted as usual’ . . . didn’t your parents say that to you here?” Whenever he heard that admonition, Henry says, “I always wanted to say, ‘ Why ?’ Just let me try to be twice as good as I am, and maybe they’ll accept me.

“So sure, there’s a huge double-(standard) for us. And I accept the masks, the aspect of what black people have to do to survive in the wider world. It’s not pretty, but it’s what we have to do.

“And,” he concludes quietly, “it’s tough.”

“True Identity” shows how tough the going gets when Henry’s character must change his identity when he inadvertently runs afoul of a mobster. He appeals to his best friend, Dwight (played by Lane), a motion-picture makeup artist. “Ya gotta trust me,” Dwight warns, as he spins the transformed Miles around to meet his new self in the mirror: his new self is blond and . . . white . In fact, he looks a lot like George Segal. Initially, the metamorphosis has a higher price than Miles is willing to pay. “Look,” he tells Dwight, “I traced my roots back to an amoeba in the Gambia! This is not something I want to do--it’s almost an insult!” But Miles has a difficult choice: He can masquerade as white and wake up breathing every morning (and, he hopes, collar his would-be assassins) or he can, in the wryly ironic maxim, “stay black and die.”

We watch him modify his walk from easy stroll to a clench businessman’s swift trot. And he discovers he can hail cabs with uncharacteristic ease and that white women no longer nervously clutch their purses when he approaches.

Andy Breckman’s original script for Disney remains fairly true to the premise, but both Lane and Henry insisted on one critical change: “The cardinal thing in this movie was to make sure we didn’t pander to that old stereotype,” Lane says. “You know, the notion that claims that inside every black person beats the heart of someone dying to be white.”

“Miles doesn’t want to be white,” Henry concurs. “Turning white is a painful decision for him.” The fact that “True Identity’s” writer was white didn’t affect the film’s humor, but it did mean that there were, according to Henry, “racial issues that needed to be put in. Not crowbarred in, but they needed to be slipped in there. Black audiences,” he says, “would’ve been (angry) if we’d done the movie and said,” he assumes a hearty Ed McMahon-type voice: “ ‘Hey, it’s about a black guy who puts on white makeup and has lots o f fun! It’s great to be white!’ ”

Henry and Lane look at each other and shake their heads in silent mirth. “No,” Henry says with Homey the Clown hauteur, “I don’t think so.”

Lane also made a key change in the lead female character. Anne-Marie Johnson, who has also played Robert Townsend’s leading lady in “Hollywood Shuffle” and co-stars opposite Howard Rollins in “In the Heat of the Night,” plays the role of Kristi Reeves, a svelte, chic interior designer hired to redo Carver’s Long Island estate. The original script envisioned Kristi as the Carvers’ maid, a stereotype Lane found intolerable. “That had to go; we’ve seen too many black women as maids and prostitutes in the movies. We wanted to toss that stereotype.”

In one way, “True Identity” is typical of the modern Disney film: It’s entertaining and has a fair amount of lighthearted charm. But a racial comedy, from a studio that’s not known for its films by or about blacks?

David Hoberman, president of Touchstone, thinks it makes perfect sense. “ ‘True Identity’ should appeal to both black and white audiences,” Hoberman says. “It’s not a Spike Lee film; it’s evenly distributed.”

Henry found his Disney experience “by turns exhilarating, challenging and sometimes frustrating.” For one thing, it blew the whole myth of “Angelenos being laid-back people, folks who sit around in Hawaiian shirts, short pants, hanging out, catching a wave, drinking a martini. People work here like there’s no tomorrow: if there were 27 hours in the day, they’d push for 28.”

He admires veteran movie stars who were groomed under the old studio system: “They did four or five movies a year, back to back. Those people showed up on the set, they were ready and they knew who their character was. None of this Method stuff.”

Henry says he’d “love to do another U.S. feature.” There are reports that he’s signed a multi-picture deal with Disney, a rumor he will neither confirm nor deny.

Meanwhile, he’s back to England to wait for the release of “Alive and Kicking,” a BBC feature by English director Robert Young. “This is a drama about a guy who’s a drug addict, who has to kick his habit if he wants to regain his wife and child. It’s about how you can’t disassociate yourself from your past but you can reshape your present and your future.”

Here, though, Henry will soon be known as a comedic chameleon. If the scope of Henry’s gifted mimicry strikes American audiences as vaguely familiar, credit or blame his principal influences, Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. He’s met Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans and Robert Townsend (“just nodding acquaintances”), and he’d “dearly like to meet Pryor. He’s one of my heroes, one of the most consummate stage comedians who’s ever lived. He uses every part of his body, regions of his voice I didn’t know existed . He can people a stage effortlessly. I admire him and I aspire to that. I’ve always used him as a benchmark.”

For now, it’s enough that people are beginning to recognize him on the street from “The Lenny Henry Show.” Like Pryor, Henry has assumed a whole stageful of characters, from a lockjawed Sloane Ranger to a social-critic Jamaican immigrant to a plummy-voiced aristocrat. And he always tries to inject a bit of social consciousness into his routine. He sees his role in “True Identity” as an extension of that mission. One can, he insists, teach while entertaining, as long as the entertainment component is fully respected.

“If you can say something about ignorance and racism and enshroud it in comedy and make people laugh, that’s fine. There’s so much work to be done worldwide, as far as racial intolerance is concerned, that if you can help to alleviate that, that’s a good thing to want to achieve. And if ‘True Identity’ can help do that in any small way, I’m happy.”