Jones, Laurie Know Comeback Trail : <i> There are plenty of well-known faces in the new film based on Jerry Sterner’s hit play “Other People’s Money.” That’s Piper Laurie playing Gregory Peck’s assistant and mistress, Bea Sullivan, and Dean Jones as his duplicitous heir, William J. Coles. : </i>

For all of you thinking about filing a missing persons report on Dean Jones, don’t bother. After a 10-year absence, the actor who made a name for himself in such Disney fluff as “The Love Bug” and “That Darn Cat” has returned to the big screen.

About the hiatus, Jones insists it was not self-imposed. “Believe me, it wasn’t by choice,” says the native of Decatur, Ala. “It’s just that it was hard to convince anybody that I could do anything other than the kind of shallow characters I had been doing.”

Once the phone stopped ringing, Jones, who earlier starred on Broadway in “Under the Yum-Yum Tree” and “Company,” kept himself busy traveling and shooting documentaries for a child-care organization. Like any unemployed actor, he longed for work.

“A phone call from any director would’ve brought me back in a minute,” he says.

Eventually, director Norman Jewison did call, and Jones was back in business. And he has followed “Money” with a role in the still-to-be-released comedy “Beethoven.”

Jones is hopeful his acting career will be even better the second time around. “I look at survival as the lowest possible point of existence,” he says, “but I think survival in Hollywood is a great accomplishment.”