She’s Quite a Character Actor : Show: TV and film veteran Kathleen Freeman, appearing tonight at Irvine Barclay Theatre, has a face that’s more recognizable than her name.

The first thing you notice about Kathleen Freeman is her energy. Maybe she’s just wound up because of her rush-hour trek from her home in Van Nuys to UC Irvine, but when she walks, it’s a struggle to keep up, and when she laughs, it’s a joyous noise that echoes off the buildings and startles the self-absorbed students walking by.

It’s a character actor’s lot to have a face that is oh-so familiar but can’t quite be placed, to work in film after film but have a name that’s not quite on everybody’s tongue. When Freeman shuffles through stills from her countless film and TV roles, the characters pop back into the memory with instant clarity: “Oh yeah, I remember that .”

She was the foil to Jerry Lewis in such films as “The Nutty Professor” and “The Disorderly Orderly,” the vocal coach in “Singin’ in the Rain,” Sister Mary Stigmata in “The Blues Brothers.” Television roles range from episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to a recurring character on “Hogan’s Heroes”--remember Gen. Burkhalter’s sister, the one who was always chasing Col. Klink?--to a new episode of “Doogie Howser, M.D.” airing later this month.

The roles span 40 busy years, which illustrates one of the advantages of character work: “One of the best things about being a character actor is longevity,” Freeman explained. “If you play the leading lady, generally speaking, you have a shorter acting life.”

Freeman will perform tonight in the Irvine Barclay Theatre in a one-woman show that combines musical and comedy sketches with anecdotes from her career. The show is a benefit for the Irvine Education Foundation, which supports curricula in the Irvine Unified School District. “It’s a wonderful, eclectic kind of potpourri,” she said of her show. “I do tell some delicious stories about what’s happened over the years.”

Before her stage appearance, Freeman will conduct an afternoon workshop for Irvine middle school and high-school performing-arts students. “Acting is a hand-me-down profession,” she said. “You have to get it from someone who’s been there.”

Freeman has managed to keep herself busy in an industry and a comedy climate that has evolved over the years. Her acceptance by new generations of film comics has landed her roles in the aforementioned “Blues Brothers,” in addition to the recent “Dragnet” film, “Innerspace” with Martin Short, and Joe Dante’s “Gremlins II,” in which she played a character named Microwave Marge.

“That just means I’m not static,” said Freeman, who is a big advocate of changing with the times and keeping a youthful outlook. “When I come to the set, people don’t say, ‘Oh God, here comes one of those this-is-the-way-we-did-it-in-the-’50s actresses.’ I’m not that at all.”

Freeman is not one to reminisce about any “golden age” of Hollywood--she says she’s having as much fun now as she ever had. “There are just as many flakes and inept people today as there were long ago,” she said, drawing a parallel with the political scene. “I think politics is pretty much the way it was in the Roman Forum. . . . Life is pretty much the same stuff.”

Sitting on a bench at UC Irvine and flipping through the stills, she laughs out loud at a picture from “The Disorderly Orderly,” showing her with Lewis. Playing the head nurse, she is in a nurse’s outfit and has something--Freeman just called it “stuff”--all over her face.

“Every time I see that, I just break up,” Freeman said. In one notable scene from the film, Freeman has one of the most convincing on-screen breakdowns in cinema. “I just went all out. You take a big chance with something like that,” Freeman said. “I just happened to come out a big winner.”

While she is best known for her film and TV roles, she also works on the stage and does plenty of voice-over work in cartoons and commercials. While the demands are different, “good acting is good acting and bad acting is bad acting,” she said.

“I’ve done it all and I’ll keep doing it all. I love the differences and I love the benefits each has to offer,” she said. As far as retirement is concerned, “I don’t even know what that word means. There is no other creature in the animal kingdom that retires.”

And, for the record, she gets recognized all the time, and many of the people even know her name and remember specific roles.

“Other times,” Freeman said, “I get, ‘Wait a minute, aren’t you a friend of my mother’s?’ ”

* Kathleen Freeman appears in a one-woman show tonight at 8 in the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. Tickets: $10 (general) and $5 (students). (714) 854-4646.