Tim Curry’s Favorite Year : Christmas isn’t even here yet, but 1992 has gifted the actor with two plum vehicles: ‘Home Alone 2’ and the new Broadway musical ‘My Favorite Year’

“I’m not an actor,” Alan Swann cries. “I’m a movie star!!!”

It’s the most famous line from the 1982 film “My Favorite Year.” And as delivered by Tim Curry--who plays the dissipated swashbuckler in Lincoln Center’s new musical version--it takes on conversely ironic overtones: Curry, after all, has precisely the opposite problem.

After years of delivering celebrated, eccentric performances on stage and screen, he remains a respected but amorphous quantity; an actor, not a movie star, who has taken what seems like a perverse pleasure in selecting roles on the basis of how difficult, or potentially uncommercial, they seem to be.

“I was going to get myself a pin that read ‘TIT’--’Terrific in Turkeys,’ ” Curry said last week, before a rehearsal at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

Yes, along with his Tony-nominated Mozart in the original “Amadeus,” and his work in England with the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theater, there has been a lot of dubious cinema (“Clue,” “The Shout,” “Times Square,” “Legend”). Even “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” in which Curry immortalized himself as the Transylvanian transvestite Dr. Frank N. Furter, bombed when first released. But his turn as a corrupt record producer on TV’s “Wiseguy” brought him widespread acclaim; his role as a Soviet doctor in “The Hunt for Red October” gave him some moderate screen success. And now, all of Curry’s bad karma has finally evaporated. His track record has been wiped clean. As the imperious, dyspeptic concierge in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” he’s hit the public-recognition jackpot.

“I wanted to be in a movie that people saw,” he admitted, not quite sheepishly.

Curry, amiable and thoughtful, sat in the office of Beaumont artistic director Andre Bishop, cigarettes at the ready, looking quite dapper in basic black and a Mephistophelian goatee. Unlike some actors, who respond to interviews with one-word answers, or others, who chatter endlessly and say nothing, Curry mulls over each response, intent on preserving the lost art of speaking in complete sentences.

“Home Alone 2” and “My Favorite Year” may make this an uncharacteristically frothy season for Curry. And yet Alan Swann is proof of a persistent penchant for picking the inherently difficult role.

The original “My Favorite Year” was a kind of a male version of “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Gloria Swanson, faded star of silent film, played Norma Desmond, faded star of silent film. Following that lead, Peter O’Toole, notoriously debauched film idol, created Swann, notoriously debauched film idol. For someone else to assume such a role, and in a musical version besides, is an act of courage. Or madness.

“I remember when the notices appeared in the papers that this was going to be staged, I sort of cocked an eye and thought, ‘Oh no,’ ” Curry admitted. “But when it really started to get off the ground and they started calling . . . I figured out in the end that I was scared. So I came.”

Curry said that the O’Toole-Swann parallel was “one of the reasons why the film was extraordinarily moving as well as funny,” but he’s avoided the movie, which he saw when it first opened, and is intent on divorcing his Swann from O’Toole’s.

“Not that I haven’t done a lot of the same research,” Curry, 46, said with his Cheshire Cat’s smile. “But it was clear from the way the script was going that the creative team had long since abandoned the movie. And I think there are 10 crucial years here: Peter was in his mid-50s when he did it, and that’s quite different from your mid-40s. And I think the demands of the musical are a quite different thing.

“To some extent, too, there’s been a marginal attempt to tailor things in the show to what I can do, just the way, as Lainie Kazan explained, things were tailored to O’Toole in the movie.”

Kazan is reprising her film role as Belle Steinberg Carroca, mother of Benjy Stone (Evan Pappas), whose memories are the basis of “My Favorite Year.” Benjy is the junior writer on “King Kaiser’s Komedy Kavalcade,” a 1954 TV variety show modeled on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows”; Swann, an Errol Flynn character, is to be a guest on the program, and Stone is ordered by Kaiser (Tom Mardirosian) to keep Swann out of trouble.

The score is by the “Once on This Island” team of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, and the director is Ron Lagomarsino, who explained the indirect route Curry’s casting took.

“When we were searching for the right person to play this role, I actually looked at the movie of ‘Annie,’ which Tim was in, to check out Albert Finney’s performance,” Lagomarsino said. “I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story, but Finney was originally offered the role of Swann in the movie, and from what I understand when he turned it down he said, ‘This is a role for Peter O’Toole, you don’t want me.’

“The natural thing, I thought, was to start with Finney, but there was Tim. He’s on the young side for the role now, and he was even younger then, but he had all the qualities--dashing, dangerous, sly, with a great sense of style. And he really is a delight to work with. He’ll try anything and that makes it easy for me to test things and see if they’ll work. He’ll go out on a limb. And while he’s very self-deprecating he’s also very astute about what a scene or his performance needs.”

The production, both director and star agreed, is in “endless transition” as it prepares for Thursday’s opening night.

“Musicals are famous for being in a constant state of flux,” Curry said. “ ‘Send in the Clowns’ was added just two days before (“A Little Night Music”) opened. There’s nothing more daunting than a musical, but there’s also no more direct line to joy. Getting there, though, is like pushing treacle up stairs.”

Curry’s co-star Andrea Martin, who plays brassy head writer Alice Miller, remarked on Curry’s resilience. “It’s amazing how he can be given a new song--they added a new one three days ago--and do it full out, with that kind of wide open, bravura style. It shows his background, the roles he’s performed before.

“We talked about the confidence that you need in this kind of show,” she said. “How if you’re feeling discouraged or tired, you really have to get geared up. Because doing a character like this isn’t just about talent.”

Curry’s off-again, on-again relationship with the stage is rooted partly in passion, partly in pragmatism. “You can’t stay away from the theater too long,” he said. “It’s not even about craft, it’s about attitude--attitude and stamina and the courage to go up there and create a world every day, just to physically slice through the air. When I did ‘Amadeus,’ I hadn’t done a play for five years. One of the things that made me want to go back on stage was going to the ballet a lot and seeing people displace air and light. And feeling horribly envious.”

He motions toward a room full of Beaumont staffers. “It’s really a swell place to work,” he said. “I’ve worked in a few sort of ‘institutional’ theaters--the Royal Shakespeare, the National Theater in England--and they’re hopelessly top-heavy with bureaucracy. I mean, Dame Maggie Smith refers to the National as ‘the garage.’ But it’s been wonderful here.”

As pleased as he is with the Beaumont, he’s equally pleased with New York; Curry is an Angeleno now, with a house and the requisite garden. (“When an Englishman turns 30,” he said, “a trowel becomes grafted to his hand, like a prosthetic device.”)

“It’s wonderful to be back here in New York,” Curry said. “I lived here for about four years in the early ‘80s and I’ve been back a couple of times, once when I did (“The Art of Success”) at the Manhattan Theater Club. But I didn’t take to New York well at all then. I suppose because I had ensconced myself so well in L.A. I’ve been there four years now, living a more measured life--the kind of life I thought I deserved.”

Laughing--it’s a deep laugh, and a little unnerving--he adds, “But this time I do feel I’ve tuned into the city and that it’s actually a very good time for this city. It may have to do with Clinton being elected, and the run up to the election. And, of course, fall is the most wonderful time and people here are more gracious than usual.” More gracious, certainly, than in ’79 and ‘80, when Curry was doing “Amadeus” and the “Rocky Horror” cult was at its peak.

“It was really insane,” Curry said. “And the most extreme devotees knew exactly where to find me, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, eight shows a week. It actually got pretty scary. I had satanic people beating on my apartment door saying they were going to kill me, and other people going through my garbage. I found it very disorienting, because as far as I was concerned it was a play that I’d done, and a film that I’d done and I was on to the next thing, thank you very much. But it does play on virtually every campus in America and introduces me to another raft of young people who go to the theater and the movies.”

Curry was born in Cheshire, England, the son of a Navy chaplain, and the military family moved frequently. His father died when he was 12, and Curry spent a “rather pastoral boyhood” at schools in the west of England. His grandfather would take him to music halls, he said, but “the thing I was really taken with was the great Technicolor musicals; it’s the form that’s closest to my heart in a way. It’s the most comfortable synthesis of all the things I do.”

Curry cut three rock albums in the early ‘80s, and did the long U.S. tour of “Me and My Girl” (“I enjoyed it the first six months,” he said. “By the end of the tour I was actually in the shrink’s office.”) But Curry seems rooted in an earlier tradition, that of the English music hall performer, the classic entertainer of multi-talents. It’s a subject that brings up Sir Richard Attenborough’s upcoming film “Chaplin,” the story of another English entertainer. It’s suggested that the casting of Curry as Chaplin would have made sense.

“It made sense to me, too,” Curry said. “I desperately wanted to do that film . . . but they wanted an actor in his early 30s and I didn’t qualify.”

His affection for Chaplin is touching, given the parallels between them: English boyhood, rootless upbringing, artistic restlessness.

“I actually look, without the beard, like a cross between Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, anyway,” Curry said. “It’s a face that’s writ large.”

He was offered a Chaplin musical on Broadway at one time, he said. “It’s actually one of my favorite stories: I said no, I wanted to go back to London and have a classical year or two and (director) Joe Layton said to John Huston: ‘I just offered him this Broadway musical to play Charlie Chaplin. He’s turned it down, he’s out of his mind.’ Huston said . . .”--and Curry’s impersonation of the late director is eerily right--” ’I don’t know . . . it’s exactly what Charlie would have done . . . given the opportunity.’

“He’s very clever, though,” Curry said of Robert Downey Jr., who plays Chaplin in the movie. “He’s just done some bad movies.

“And you know,” Curry adds, grinning that grin, “I can really dig it.”