Screen’s Mercurial Girl Is at It Again : Movies: Jennifer Jason Leigh enters the fantastic burlesque of ‘30s screwball comedies in ‘Hudsucker Proxy’

Jennifer Jason Leigh loves to smoke. But she doesn’t smoke. But she’s smoking.

“I’m about to play a chain-smoker,” the actress explains, nestled in a sofa in a Park Avenue hotel room. “So why stop and begin again?”

Why indeed? Why even ask? When you take into consideration that Leigh, 32, one of the most convincing and certainly the most chameleonic of film actresses, is so umbilically linked to the characters she plays, one should assume the smoke signals an upcoming role. Or two.

She’ll soon begin shooting Taylor Hackford’s tentatively titled “Dolores Claiborne,” in which she’s Kathy Bates’ chain-smoking, pill-addicted journalist daughter. And she’s just finished playing the sad and acerbic Dorothy Parker, another heavy smoker, in Alan Rudolph’s upcoming film biography, “Mrs. Parker.” The ghost of the Algonquin may also explain the tightly coiffed hair, and tightly wound presence Leigh exudes on this particular Monday afternoon.

Leigh admits that yes, she does get “heavily involved” in the roles she plays. She lost weight to play an anorexic in “The Best Little Girl in the World,” gained weight to play a bloated prostitute in “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” lost sleep to play a jumpy junkie cop in “Rush” and lost herself in research for every other role. Her dedication to her art, in fact, is her most identifying characteristic. Otherwise, she tends to disappear into each fictional person she portrays.

Hence, she has no tidy Hollywood image. And perhaps as a result, she hasn’t had any really big hits, even though virtually all her performances--even in otherwise forgettable movies like “Backdraft,” where she makes love to William Baldwin on top of a fire engine, or “Single White Female,” in which she played Bridget Fonda’s lethal roommate--have garnered critical praise. Her contribution to Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts”--a slatternly housewife who dispenses phone sex to pay bills--proves she can do just about anything. And has, in the course of playing a variety of what one writer called “sluts and nuts.”

But even under her brittle Parker-inspired demeanor and unyielding cosmetics--which conceal what Harper’s Bazaar proclaimed in 1992 as one of its top 10 beauties--there’s a sweetness that resurfaces, either when saying goodby to a camera crew that’s leaving her hotel suite, or reminiscing about her girlhood.

“I got stomach flu a lot,” says Leigh, daughter of the late actor Vic Morrow, and the screenwriter Barbara Turner. “So I got to stay home from school, which I loved ‘cause I got to sleep in my mom’s bed, have meals in bed and it was great! Because I got to watch old movies on TV. What could be better? I grew up loving those movies, but I never thought I’d have a chance to play in one. And then this script came.”

This script was “The Hudsucker Proxy,” a fantastic burlesque of ‘30s screwball comedies by the other-worldly team of Joel and Ethan Coen (“Raising Arizona,” “Miller’s Crossing,” “Barton Fink”). The film, which opens today, is set in the ‘50s, co-stars Tim Robbins and Paul Newman and although it’s the most accessible film they’ve done to date, bears the unmistakable Coen brothers imprint.

Given Leigh’s penchant for character absorption and the fact she completed “Hudsucker” a year ago, by interview time there aren’t too many traces--outside of Leigh’s actual, diminutive physical presence--of Amy Archer, the smart, caustic, machine-gun-mouthed reporter who’s the centerpiece of “Hudsucker.” Leigh has done comedy before, but Archer’s a departure, the kind of female character who hasn’t been seen on screen since Katharine Hepburn and “Woman of the Year.”

“She just came in and blew us away,” said producer Joel Silver (the “Die Hards” and “Lethal Weapons”), for whom “Hudsucker” is also something of a departure. “She came in with this full-blown characterization, and who would have dreamed? All I can say is I’m happy she did.”

Robbins, her co-star, had to read for his role in “Hudsucker” too, he said, and once he was cast he started reading with all the other “potential Amys.”

“But Jennifer came in like gangbusters,” Robbins said. “The character was already there.”

Once casting was complete, he said, there was a solid two weeks of rehearsal. “We had to work off each other, develop a common vocabulary.” And, he said, Leigh came to the set with no “baggage.” “Some people, you expect attitude, self-indulgence. Jennifer’s incredibly professional.”

And adventurous, like everyone else involved with “Hudsucker.” Maybe it’s a testament to the filmmakers, but the movie is rife with incongruities: pop maestro Silver, producing for the alternative Coens; the noble Paul Newman, playing a version of Snidely Whiplash; Robbins, in his goofiest role since Nuke Laloosh in “Bull Durham.” And Leigh, the pinup girl for modern anxiety, doing the retro boogie.

“(Amy) is very reminiscent of all those 1930s and ‘40s heroines in the screwball Capra movies and Preston Sturges movies, Howard Hawks, Cukor,” Leigh said. “It’s not just Hepburn though. I’m doing everybody. Amy Archer is like all those characters rolled up into one: ‘Meet John Doe,’ ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,’ ‘The Lady Eve,’ ‘Philadelphia Story,’ ‘Woman of the Year,’ ‘Holiday,’ ‘His Girl Friday’ . . . “

Perhaps it’s this last film, the Cary Grant-Roz Russell remake of “The Front Page,” that “Hudsucker” most closely resembles, at least in velocity of words and setting. Amy is--as her colleagues are quite tired of hearing--a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who smells a story, or at least a rat, when Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) is quite suddenly elevated from the mail room to the executive offices of Hudsucker Industries. The company’s founder, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), has just done a Brody from the 44th floor (“45th counting the lobby”) and the nefarious Sidney J. Mussburger (Newman) is using Norville to drive down the price of the stock so the board can buy up a majority interest and retain control.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins’ camera work evokes a multitude of film references, from “It’s a Wonderful Life” to “The Big Clock,” to every film starring Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur or Carole Lombard. The dialogue is rapid-fire, the action, hyperkinetic.

“I think it’s an homage, definitely,” Leigh says. “And it’s also about film. But it certainly recalls those movies and loves those movies, clearly. It goofs on them too, but not as much as it goofs on the characters.”

Although associated more with low life than high comedy, Leigh says she loves working for laughs--the scene in “Hudsucker” where she makes Robbins believe she knows the words to his high school song is priceless--and she loved working with the Coens. The way she describes it, though, sounds a bit stressful.

“I always felt while I was doing this movie that I wasn’t going to make it through,” she says. “When I got the part, I thought, ‘There’s just no way my life could be this good, no way I could be this lucky. I’ll probably die, I’ll certainly die.’ I even investigated getting a car that had air bags.”

Working with the Coens still seems less stressful than interviews (“It’s funny,” she muses. “I’ve gone from playing three prostitutes to playing three jour- nalists . . . “). But she’s happy to talk about acting, and what she has to go through to do it.

For “Hudsucker,” she had to practice a unique kind of nearly extinct speech pattern, that southern New England lockjaw Hepburn has. “I did it a lot,” Leigh said, “because I wanted it to be comfortable for me. I didn’t want it to sound artificial ‘cause it’s such a bizarre way of speaking, that Standard American. People just don’t do it anymore.

“But it was much harder to stand straight,” she adds. “The actresses during that period always had beautiful posture. They took elocution lessons, took posture classes, it was a completely different time. So standing up straight was something I had to learn how to do, it wasn’t in my repertoire. I learned how to type, too . . . “

This is a gag, as is her typing in “Hudsucker,” a leisurely one-finger affair that doesn’t correspond at all with the words exploding in the voice-over. It’s part of a loose, goofy style of filmmaking that one does not associate with Leigh, although the one thing you can say is there’s no standard JJL role.

“And that’s good,” she says. “I don’t want to play the same person twice, that’s not why I wanted to act. I want to play great roles and work with directors I admire, and it’s getting easier now. I’ve always done roles that really appealed to me on a gut level and which I found inspiring. So it’s great that I continue to work and that I get to do great parts. Life is good at the moment.”