The ‘Spirit’ Moves Her : Jean Stapleton long ago shed her Edith Bunker persona, and now she’s tackling things like Noel Coward’s <i> veddy</i> British ‘Blithe Spirit.’

Jean Staple ton wanted to know, “Is it GEN-uine or genu-INE?” Her veddy British accent sounded impeccable, but she was taking no chances.

Nicholas Hormann, who sounded veddy veddy himself, pulled out his pronunciation dictionary and flaunted it. The second day of rehearsals for South Coast Repertory’s “Blithe Spirit” had just begun, and the entire cast was in a bantering mood over the pronunciation of all sorts of Anglicisms.

“Is it ZEH-bra or ZEE-bra?”

“Is it CON-troversy or con-TRAH-versy?”

The rehearsal space had mismatched tables and chairs laid out to indicate where the furniture would be on the set. A curved plywood cutout stood in for the grand piano.

Noel Coward’s comedy, which previews Friday and opens April 14 on the SCR Mainstage, takes place in 1941 in the comfortably appointed living room of a house in Kent, England, and revolves around the improbable menage of a writer and his two wives, one of whom is young and cheeky, but dead. She has been whisked back from the spirit world by Madame Arcati, the local medium--Stapleton’s role.

In a scoop-necked jersey and stretch pants, Stapleton buried her nose in the script. Like the other actors, she was not yet “off book.” When director William Ludel asked her to offer a glimpse of Madame Arcati’s psychic warm-ups for the first-act seance, she came downstage and proceeded to march across the floor like a majorette.

“Maybe something subtler?” she cracked, windmilling her arms like an aerobics instructor.

Rest assured, a British-style Edith Bunker was not trying to get out. Since “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking CBS sitcom that she left in 1980, Stapleton has never had to look back.

While the public inevitably associates her with Archie Bunker’s “dingbat” wife--she played the role for 8 1/2 years, winning three Emmy Awards and becoming a downtrodden symbol for women’s rights--Stapleton has shown remarkable versatility shuttling between the theater and television.

In 1982, she gave an acclaimed dramatic performance as Eleanor Roosevelt in the CBS movie “Eleanor: First Lady of the World.” She made her operatic debut in 1984 at the Baltimore Opera Company in Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide.” (Yes, the actress who played the Queens housewife with the tremulous screech, is a trained mezzo-soprano.)

In 1989, she added an Obie Award to her formidable list of honors, for Off Broadway performances in an evening of Harold Pinter plays, “The Birthday Party” and “Mountain Language.” She also has done “Arsenic and Old Lace” in Beverly Hills and San Diego, “Oklahoma!” with the Music Center Opera in Los Angeles, Moliere in San Francisco, Shakespeare in Washington and, back in New York again, several Horton Foote plays--most recently “Night Seasons.”

“Going back and forth between theater and television really oils up the motor,” Stapleton said in an interview at SCR between rehearsals. “One enriches the other, and I love having the freedom to do that. Besides, you really do have to subsidize your work in the theater.”

Then “All in the Family” did not set her up for life?

“Everyone thinks that residuals are pouring into my mailbox, but they’re not,” she explained. “I took a buyout--most of us did--which was customary at the time. It was a tidy sum, which I don’t remember,”--in other words, don’t ask--”and is well gone.”

More important, Stapleton said, the series made her “a better actress” because it was “as close as you can get to rep experience. We were the same company for a very long time, and we were definitely an ensemble.”

She has done Coward before, during her early career in stock, but never “Blithe Spirit,” which has always tempted her. “Can you imagine what fun Coward had writing this play?” she asked.

By his own account, in his autobiography “Future Indefinite,” he wrote it in six days. Equally astonishing, he made no corrections “beyond a few typographical errors” and “only two lines of the original script were ultimately cut.” After “Blithe Spirit” opened at the Piccadilly Theatre under his direction, it became the longest-running West End play until Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” came along a decade later.

“The man was simply a genius,” Stapleton continued. “I’m so grateful to South Coast for acknowledging that Madame Arcati is my kind of part. She may be a spiritualist, but she’s very pragmatic, very earthy. Her conviction is total. And she’s a professional. When Madame Arcati is called an amateur, she resents it heartily.

“I love her application to work. And I have the special pleasure of speaking lines which are really the author’s own. When Madame Arcati says, ‘Long ago, I decided that nothing has ever been proven about anything,’ that’s Coward saying what he thinks. Then there’s that wonderful line, ‘Time is the reef on which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked.’ So florid, but isn’t it beautiful?”

T he New York-born actress grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the daughter of an advertising salesman who went broke during the Depression and a professional opera singer.

“Music brought our family together,” Stapleton recalled. “I played piano. I did not aspire to a concert career, but I accompanied my mother at home. All through high school, my main interest was music. Immediately after I graduated, I was seized by the desire to act.”

To help support her family, however, she went to work as a typist in an insurance company and eventually rose to secretary. By night she took acting classes and joined various small theater groups, including the American Actors Company, where she first met Horton Foote, one of its founders.

Stapleton started her career as a singer in the Robert Shaw Collegiate Chorale and made her theatrical debut in stock during the early ‘40s. But she didn’t get to Broadway until the mid-1950s, when she landed a cameo in Jane Bowles’ “In the Summer House.” George Abbott discovered her in that drama for “Damn Yankees,” her first musical. She also did “Bells Are Ringing” and, in 1964, originated the role of Mrs. Strakosh in “Funny Girl,” singing “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” about the young Fanny Brice.

“That was some out-of-town tryout,” Stapleton remembered. “We got hit with so many problems. One was a big flu epidemic. I think the opening in New York was delayed about eight times.”

What of all those time-honored tales about Barbra Streisand’s temperamental demands and how difficult she could be to work with?

“It was nonsense in my opinion. I’ll tell you what that’s all about. Anybody who is a perfectionist always gets that reputation, and she was a young perfectionist with the highest standards. But in my experience, she was never difficult.”

Stapleton has lived in Los Angeles since 1971, when she was brought to Hollywood for “All in the Family.” She regrets that “it’s not a theater town,” despite having “a lot of good theater.” The Southern California car culture is to blame, she believes, not the movie or television industries. But she still prefers living here to living in New York.

“That’s my town,” she said. “I like to go there. I like to work there. And then I like to leave.”

In recent years, she has worked more and more on the West Coast. In fact, San Francisco theatergoers will be seeing a lot of Stapleton next season. American Conservatory Theatre just signed her to do Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” in rep.

Meanwhile, she is scheduled to play Eleanor Roosevelt on June 27 at the Herbst Theater, also in San Francisco. The as-yet-untitled one-woman show will help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations charter. Novelist Rhoda Lerman is writing the script. It will be co-produced by A.C.T. and New York’s Theater Guild, which has signed Stapleton to tour the show after the San Francisco premiere.

“I became a political animal to some degree in the ‘70s when I came out here,” she said. “I was a great supporter of the equal rights amendment. As a young woman I was apolitical, absolutely geared to my career. I’ve become much more interested in the world as I’ve grown older. One of the greatest learning experiences of my life was playing Eleanor Roosevelt.”

Stapleton does not hesitate to name three other “quality characters” on her learning curve: the hip Mother Goose she played for Shelley Duvall’s “Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme” on the Disney Channel; the Fairy Godmother she did in “Cinderella” for “Faerie Tale Theatre” on Showtime, and her current role as Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle for Duvall’s latest children’s series, “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.”

“They’re examples of what I respond to,” she said. “When the script for ‘Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’ came along, the character leaped off the page. It was quality stuff, so well-written and literate. Right up my alley. I’m a character actress, thank God.”*

Vital Stats

Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”

Address

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Price

$16-$26, previews; $26-$36. Pay what you will, April 15, 2:30 p.m.

Schedule

Previews begin April 7; opens April 14; runs through May 14. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday, 2:30 p.m.

Information

(714) 957-4033