Profile : Ullman Slices Up the Big Apple

Tracey Ullman may divide her time between Los Angeles and London, but when it comes to life’s roller coaster, there’s no ride, she feels, quite like New York.

“I’ve had the best times of my life there, and the worst,” says Ullman, 33, greeting a journalist on a drizzly, gray day that couldn’t be more English. One moment, as she describes it, she’s acting Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” in Central Park opposite Morgan Freeman, marveling nightly at the “fabulous audiences that would sit through a monsoon.” Eight months later, she makes her Broadway debut in a solo show, “The Big Love,” only to be buffeted by the Gulf War and a stinging review from the New York Times.

Theater ups and downs aside, Ullman acknowledges both the city’s Janus-faced brio, and its noise. “It was never quiet; I didn’t sleep the whole time I was there,” she recalls of her 1983 honeymoon in Manhattan with her husband, producer Allan McKeown. “It’s 4 in the morning, there’s no traffic, and yet they insist on putting on the sirens. And yet the place does have the most incredible spirit.”

Her HBO special “Tracey Ullman: Takes On New York,” airing Saturday, honors all these New Yorks and more, even as it allows Ullman to flaunt once again a range that has won her four Emmys. (She won again this year as guest actress in a comedy series for “Love & War”.)

During the show’s three segments, Ullman’s five reincarnations include a Wisconsin tourist plucked to star in a Broadway revival of “Finian’s Rainbow”; a tough-minded British editor transplanted to Manhattan whom Tina Brown and Anna Wintour may or may not recognize; and a Jewish mother from Long Island with exacting hotel room standards. (“They promised us a mini-suite,” she snarls at her husband. “Where’s the suite part?”)

If the material occasionally suggests Neil Simon’s 1970 film “The Out-of-Towners,” the echoes are deliberate. “That was sort of an inspiration,” Ullman says of the film in which Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis play hapless visitors to the Big Apple. “We called it that originally but then thought we might risk too many comparisons. But I loved the idea of everything going wrong.”

“Tracey Ullman: Takes On New York” is the first of two Ullman specials to be seen on HBO this fall. In November, Ullman appears alongside Michael Palin in “Tracey Ullman: A Class Act,” a trio of sketches on a favorite topic--England’s enduring class system.

But weren’t the Thatcher years said to have produced a new classless Britain? “That’s absolute garbage,” replies Ullman, herself newly installed with her family in a section of London’s Mayfair associated primarily with aristocrats and visiting Arabs.

“My husband’s very working-class,” she says, “so I suppose I get a lot of this feeling from him. But as a child I went from private school to state school and was beaten up for speaking like a posh girl. I jumped around the class system; I saw all of it really.”

America offered respite from such concerns while making her a star with four seasons of “The Tracey Ullman Show.” And while some Britons flounder in the crossing, Ullman flourished. “My women influences were American--Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore and Gilda Radner, my hero. I used to sit at home pregnant watching ‘Leave It to Beaver’ and ‘My Three Sons,’ so by the time I started doing my show, I felt really integrated.”

Ullman regards TV fondly--”I like the immediacy and the speed of it; films are so slow sometimes spontaneity and instinct get lost”--but for the moment prefers HBO-style specials to a weekly series. “Series are just too demanding with my children being young,” she says of Mabel, 7, and Johnny, 2. “To be able to make two of these (specials) a year if they’re successful would be lovely.”

There’s also a film career to keep an eye on, she says, having come to attention on screen as Meryl Streep’s peppery friend in Fred Schepisi’s “Plenty” (1985). Since then, Ullman has been in “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “I Love You to Death” and the current “Household Saints.”

She plays an Atlanta housewife opposite Nick Nolte in James L. Brooks’s upcoming musical, “I’ll Do Anything.” “I sing a song written by Prince; it’s a fascinating project.” Next up is the new Woody Allen movie, which starts shooting this fall. (“I don’t want to say anything in case he says, ‘You big mouth; you’re not in it anymore.’ ”)

Does Ullman worry about the vagaries of being hot, or not, in movies? The actress, ever the pragmatist, views her limitations as actual assets to her career. “It’s not dependent on looks, my career,” she says. “I’m not traditionally beautiful.”

“I’m a character actress, so I think I can probably go to the end of my life,” she laughs, “and be all right.”

“Tracey Ullman : Takes On New York” airs Saturday at 10 p.m. on HBO ; “Class Act “ airs in November on HBO.