Profile : Serious Business : REBECCA DE MORNAY PLAYS THE OPPOSITE OF GLAMOUR IN ABC’S ‘GETTING OUT’

Before she went to Atlanta to makes her latest film, “Getting Out,” Rebecca De Mornay recalls seeing a woman standing aimlessly on a Los Angeles street corner.

“She was really dirty and down and out,” says De Mornay, who came to fame 11 years ago in “Risky Business” as a sophisticated call girl who seduces naive Tom Cruise.

“She was holding an infant, standing on the street, not begging, just sort of standing. You saw she obviously had nowhere to go and she wasn’t asking for anything. I thought, ‘Who speaks for these people?’ ”

De Mornay feels “Getting Out,” which premieres Monday on ABC, does speak for those who “have no voice in our society--the marginal, shadowy figures you kind of hope go away. It’s very emotional for me to watch the movie because it’s really (about) these people. I do care about them. I think there’s a lot of people who do care about them.”

Written by Eugene Corr and Ruth Shapiro, “Getting Out” is based on Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman’s acclaimed 1977 play of the same name. The gritty drama finds De Mornay as Arlene (Arlie) Holsclaw, an uneducated, young Georgia woman who has been rehabilitated and released from prison after serving time for theft and murder convictions.

Arlene finds it rough going in the outside world, as she desperately tries to put her previous life behind. Her mother (Ellen Burstyn) is cruel and abusive. Her ex-con pimp boyfriend (Rob Knepper) wants her to return to the world’s oldest profession. To make matters worse, the son Arlene gave birth to in prison was put up for adoption by her mother. Arlene can’t bear the pain when she’s informed she has no legal rights to her son and will violate her parole if she tries to meet him.

De Mornay decided not to read Norman’s play. “I didn’t want to know what they changed,” she says. “I wanted to play exactly what was in the script. I could feel enough of Marsha Norman in the dialogue. I didn’t want to beat myself and scream at everybody and say, ‘You got to put this back in.’ ”

Not that they could have put anything back in. The movie came in at nearly two hours, “so they cut about a half-hour out. This character was basically in every scene, so they cut a half-hour out of my character.”

The 31-year-old actress laughs: “That’s what I hate!”

De Mornay says she worked hard to get a specific look for Arlene, one far removed from her coolly glamorous turns in “Risky Business,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “Guilty As Sin.”

“I kind of look haggard in it,” De Mornay says, sipping on a soft drink in her publicist’s Beverly Hills office. “I didn’t want to have a svelte body for it. I thought it would be wrong. I didn’t do anything huge. I didn’t want it to be about, ‘Look. Rebecca De Mornay really gained weight.’ ”

But she did gain 10 pounds by eating cheeseburgers and French fries. She also changed her reddish-blond hair to a mousy brown. “I didn’t wear any makeup in it except for a few scenes.”

De Mornay also made sure she perfected her Southern accent before filming began. “I worked on it by myself. That was very important because I could never be thinking about the accent. It had to be totally second nature and that worked pretty well.”

Because the film was made in 20 days, De Mornay didn’t have time to rehearse. “It was boom, we were shooting,” she says. “I didn’t even get to meet Ellen Burstyn until the last week when we shooting all of her stuff.”

Director John Korty (“The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman”) is pleased with De Mornay’s work in the film. “I think she needs a lot of support as she goes along,” he explains. Before Korty began the project, he screened all of his leading lady’s films.

“There was some good work there,” Korty says. “But even in ‘Runaway Train’ with Jon Voight, she had a role that was a strong role, but very limited dynamics. She was kind of two or three notes. The same with the other stuff. In ‘Hand That Rocks the Cradlee’ she had a certain amount of range, but somehow you knew early on this woman was up to no good.

“When I thought about our film I said, ‘This is going to be from A to Z, because she moves from one extreme to another.’ I think she realized while we went along that this role is really stretching her in not just one or two dimensions, but all over the place. She got really involved in it. I had heard from other people she could be difficult to work with. I’ve worked with several people other people said were difficult, and I usually get along with them. I usually can get a very interesting performance and I think that we did that.”

De Mornay says she’s struggled long and hard to be taken seriously as an actress. But in retrospect, she doesn’t know if fighting for it was worth it. “People turn around and say, ‘You are stupid because people won’t be able to pigeonhole you. Therefore, it was harder to make you a product, an identifiable project, so you would be a bigger star.’ But I really wasn’t thinking like that. I really wanted to be an actress. So I did my acting, my growing and my experimenting in public-- which I guess I’m still doing.”

“Getting Out” airs Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC.