Focus : The Hard Part : CYBILL SHEPHERD’S MOVIE ON CBS TAKES HER ON AN EMOTIONAL JOURNEY

Cybill Shepherd is sitting in a director’s chair in the courtyard of a Pasadena junior high school, relishing a break in the shooting of “There Was a Little Boy,” which airs Sunday on CBS.

The production’s long hours have taken their toll; Shepherd looks exhausted. And time isn’t on her side this afternoon. No sooner does she begin to speak with a reporter than she’s called back to shoot a scene.

How about doing the interview after production’s wrapped?

Shepherd smiles, in relief. “Thanks,” she says graciously.

Two weeks later, Shepherd is eating lunch in the kitchen of her Sherman Oaks home. Adorning the walls are pictures of her three children, 13-year-old Clementine and 5-year-old twins Ariel and Zach.

“Do you want some lunch?” she asks, diving into vegetarian Israeli fare. A commercial spokesperson for the beef industry during her days on “Moonlighting,” Shepherd went vegetarian for “Little Boy” in the hope a meatless diet would give her more energy. It did.

“The emotional demands of the part were so great,” she says. “I looked at it as a challenge.”

In “Little Boy,” Shepherd plays Julie Warner, a high school teacher and expectant mother. Though Julie and husband Greg (John Heard) are excited about the baby, the impending birth triggers their long-buried feelings over the loss of their first child, Robby, who was kidnaped as a baby. Though they still blame themselves and each other for his kidnaping, they’ve not lost hope that he’ll return. One day, a defiant, delinquent teen-age boy transfers to Julie’s class. At first she wants to throw him out but then begins to realize he may be her long-lost son.

Executive producer Craig Anderson (“O Pioneers”) wanted Shepherd for Julie because he thought her acting abilities would be challenged. “This is a pretty difficult part,” he says. “It has a pretty wide emotional range. I thought this was a real good chance for her to prove the fact she was a strong actress.”

Anderson even allowed Shepherd to choose the director. After showing her a selection of films, she selected Mimi Leder (“China Beach”).

“I was interested in meeting her because she had done wonderful things,” Shepherd says. “She really pushed me in the best sense, pushed me to my very limits until I would say, ‘I don’t think I can do it better.’ She would say, ‘Yes, you can. It will be even better.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know,’ and then it would be somehow. It is the freest I have ever been with a director. She is really open.”

Shepherd prepared for the part on a psychological level by working with her therapist as well as with an Los Angeles County specialist who deals with families affected by kidnaping. With her therapist, Shepherd says, “What we usually work on is the beginning of a role and learning how to not take it home so much. But when you have a schedule like this one, when I got home I had to go to sleep, basically, because the hours were so long.”

“Little Boy” isn’t the first time Shepherd’s played a mother who has lost a child. In 1990’s “Texasville,” directed by former boyfriend Peter Bogdanovich, the character she played had to cope with the death of her child.

“I always wanted to play what I haven’t lived yet,” Shepherd says. “That’s one of the great things about acting. It helps you with your life because losing is something, death and dying is something, that we are all going to experience.”

One of the most difficult scenes for Shepherd in “Little Boy” occurs when Julie flies into a rage at her husband when a lead to Robby’s whereabouts goes nowhere. Her tirade, she says, is a smokescreen for Julie’s pain. “The pain is like an ocean that you will drown in,” Shepherd explains. “It is so deep. As I have come to know pain in my own life, and through psychotherapy have begun to understand, you really have to feel it in order to heal it.”

Shepherd stops in mid-sentence as Ariel, Zach and niece Becky come bounding into the kitchen. “Hi, sweetie,” she says with a wide smile as Ariel gives her a big hug. “Did you have lunch? You are all starving, aren’t you, after your gymnastics?”

With the children overrunning the kitchen, Shepherd suggests moving to the family room. Curling up on a sofa, she says she found working with John Heard (“Home Alone”) a “real interesting” experience. “He jokes, jokes, jokes all the way up until the moment and then he will give such a moving performance,” she says. “I just had to learn to block it out. It was distracting for me.”

Before her emotional scenes, Shepherd listened to a collection of music that she knew would push “those buttons emotionally for me.” For her pivotal scene in “Little Boy,” she chose Mozart’s Concerto for Harp and Flute.

“Once I knew I was going to play that key emotional breakdown, I had to go into my motor home,” she says. “I have to listen to the music and I have to walk. I have to be completely alone.”

“Little Boy,” Shepherd says, “more than any other film I have ever done, was a journey. It was like the opening of the door onto a train. It was like climbing onto a train that was pulling out of a station and taking me on a journey.”

“There Was a Little Boy” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS; repeats of “Moonlighting” air weekdays at noon and Saturdays at 11 a.m. on Lifetime.