Profile : A Goldwyn Apart : SCION OF THE FAMOUS SAMUELS PREFERS TO ACT ON HIS OWN

Growing up as a member of a famous Hollywood family can be daunting for a youngster. But that wasn’t the case with Tony Goldwyn.

“The great thing was that my parents were so smart; they kept us away from the business,” says Goldwyn, whose father is producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. (“Much Ado About Nothing”). Goldwyn Jr.’s father was the legendary movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn (“Wuthering Heights,” “The Thief of Baghdad”).

“By the time I came along, my grandfather was really a legend already,” Goldwyn says. The personable blue-eyed actor, 33, is relaxing this muggy afternoon on the patio of his Santa Monica house.

“His last movie, ‘Porgy and Bess,’ was made the year before I was born,” Goldwyn says. “ There was already a kind of mythology in place. But in terms of the movie business, I was totally detached from it. My father’s friends were people in the business, but we were kept completely away. I didn’t know movie stars. There was no socializing. I am so grateful for it.”

And now Goldwyn is well on his way to becoming a movie star, thanks to his performance as the murderous yuppie businessman in 1990’s box-office hit “Ghost.” Goldwyn’s latest project, “Taking the Heat,” premieres Sunday on Showtime. In the action comedy, Goldwyn plays a variation on his “Ghost” character: a callow corporate raider who witnesses a gangland murder. Lynn Whitfield (“The Josephine Baker Story”) also stars as a tough New York cop assigned to escort him to court to testify against the mobster (Alan Arkin).

“What is great about the character is people will go, ‘That’s right for the guy from ‘Ghost’ to play that part,”’ Goldwyn says. “What’s great about it is that it’s a comedy and he has a sense of humor about himself. He is kind of a cad, but you kind of love him for that.”

Goldwyn describes “Ghost” as a “once- or twice-in-a-lifetime” experience. “No one expected it,” he admits. “You don’t know if something artistically is going to work out, especially something like that. Patrick’s career was a bit on the wane, so was Whoopi’s and Demi, no one knew who she was that much. It just all worked out.”

After “Ghost” took off, everybody was giving Goldwyn advice about his next career move. He didn’t listen to anyone but himself.

“I was reading all of these bad scripts,” he says. “It was scary. I didn’t have a lot of illusions, but I knew the quickest way to kill a fledgling movie career was to jump in and make back-to-back garbage doing exactly the same thing. We can never control the quality of what we do, but at least you can kind of be selective in the roles that you play.”

So Goldwyn opted to go to New York to star in an Australian play, “The Sum of Us,” written by David Stevens (“Queen”). “People said, ‘A play? Are you crazy?,” Goldwyn recalls with a smile. Goldwyn was crazy like a fox--the off-Broadway drama became a huge hit.

“It was mainly good for me personally as it happened to be a success,” Goldwyn says. “I won an award, so it was probably more useful for my career than doing some carbon copy, but bad, of what I did in ‘Ghost.”’

Goldwyn yawns. Though it’s noon, he’s still not quite awake. He had been filming until the wee small hours another Showtime movie, “Love Matters,” set to air in the fall. An erotic thriller, Goldwyn plays another caddish character, this time who refuses to grow up. “He is just a perpetual child,” he says. “He is married and is running out on his wife because he has fallen in love with another woman. The guy is kind of reprehensible about what he does but he is so full of life and kind of vigor that you love him.”

Though he’s best known for his movie work, Goldwyn began his career in the theater. A graduate of Boston’s Brandeis University, he studied his craft for two years at London’s Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. In 1985, Goldwyn made his stage debut in “Digby” at New York’s Manhattan Theater Club.

In the theater, Goldwyn says, no one paid attention to his famous name. “As a kid you are starting out, you have a bit of an identity crisis,” Goldwyn explains. “I had to prove myself. I didn’t want to trade on my name. So for a couple of years in New York, it was great.”

But that all changed when Goldwyn came out to Hollywood. “The first door I walk into it’s, ‘How’s your dad doing? I know your brother.’ My brother John is an executive at Paramount. It was awful. People sort of see you as someone’s kid who has pretensions of being in the movie business. I think I lost jobs because people felt uncomfortable.”

And Goldwyn was always uncomfortable when his brother arranged for him to go to auditions. “It was always awful because I was John’s brother,” Goldwyn says. “They didn’t know I had done some television and theater, which no one cared about. It was tough until I got enough under my belt.”

“Taking the Heat” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on Showtime; it repeats Friday at 8 p.m. and June 16 and 22.