Williams Wrestles With TV’s Fast Pace : Television: Actress finds a meaty role in ‘Client’ series. But the production tempo allows less time to hone her craft.

It’s a heart-rending scene they are shooting at Van Nuys Airport. About as emotional as has come so far on CBS’ new one-hour drama, “John Grisham’s the Client.”

JoBeth Williams, playing Reggie Love, family-law lawyer and estranged mother, is in the lounge clutching car keys, her only sign of nervousness as she watches her children arrive. A recovering alcoholic fighting to regain custody, Love has not seen Alison, 14, and Chris, 11, who live with their father, in two years.

She reaches out. Alison (Melody Kay) recoils. “I came because Dad made me.”

Reggie sounds wondrous at how beautiful her daughter looks. Alison answers that once she wanted to be like her mother, “and now all I want is to never be like you. . . . You’ve seen me,” the girl snaps brutally. “Now watch me go.”

“Alison, Alison ,” cries Reggie, running after her. In another take, “Alison. Please give me a chance.”

Different angles, minor variations. Director James Quinn calls out “Good, that’s a print .” Assistants and crew smile. Lunch will be earlier than expected. Everyone’s happy.

Except Williams. Back at Warner Bros. ranch within the hour, the actress is not at all sure she has done the scene justice. It went by “so fast.” Though she’s hardly a newcomer to television, this is her first series, and the pace of it has been an eye-opener.

Based on Grisham’s 1993 bestseller, which became a 1994 movie starring Susan Sarandon (garnering Sarandon an Oscar nomination for best actress), “The Client”--now set in Atlanta instead of the original Memphis--is centered around Reggie helping children in peril.

“That was very frustrating [on] such an emotionally important scene,” explains Williams, munching salad out of a cardboard container. “Because of the time pressure, you become very dependent on the sound being right, the camera being right and everything happening magically at once. And sort of the last thing that gets remembered is, performance ? They’ve got to move on. ‘Well it was in focus and there were no airplanes going over.’

“In a feature, you would have spent a couple of hours getting my close-up on that, and getting it right. Here we’ve got 10 minutes. That’s the difference between shooting nine pages a day as we do in our show, and shooting three pages a day in a feature.”

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What’s frustrating in this context is that Reggie is “a wonderful role. It’s a very special part. There aren’t a lot of them out there.”

“She’s flawed,” Williams says with delight. “She’s lost custody, which is part of her motivation to help kids. She has this past and yet she’s pulled herself back up. There are a lot of people who have had to overcome those kinds of problems in our generation. She’s feisty, she’s strong, she’s Southern.”

But that’s the box actresses of a certain age are in. TV is where the good roles are.

“I’m 45,” Williams notes. “I’m not going to be getting Julia Roberts roles.”

A graduate of Brown University (1970), Williams has run the gamut from theater to daytime soaps, from movies such as “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Poltergeist” and “The Big Chill” to the miniseries “Baby M” and the TV movie “Adam,” which earned her Emmy nominations. She continues to do movies--she was in “Wyatt Earp” last year as Bessie Earp, a spunky former prostitute with a feminist viewpoint, but overall in recent years, “TV roles have been much more complicated.”

The one that got away--”probably [my] biggest goof”--was “Murphy Brown.” “It was written for me,” Williams says. Her friend, writer-producer Diane English, “was conceiving the series. We met, we talked [but] I had been trying to be a mother for about six years. And I had just adopted my son, as an infant.”

She and her husband, director John Pasquin (“The Santa Clause”), have two adopted sons, Will, 7, and Nick, 5, who are “the light of my life.”

A redhead who bears an uncanny resemblance to actress Susan Hayward, Williams is in every scene on “The Client,” whether attending a cocktail party in sexy, V-necked black or counseling an Alcoholics Anonymous friend in trouble. But it’s Sarandon to whom she’s compared. And that can sometimes grate.

If Williams’ Reggie seems softer, less gritty than Sarandon’s--just as the office and the house she shares with Mama Love appear spiffier and more upscale--Williams suggests that the series character encounters a broader range of situations: “We see sides of Reggie we didn’t get to see in the movie.”

There has been enough drama in Williams’ life to match any of her roles. An only child, she grew up in Houston, “in a household where my father was an alcoholic. My mother always said, ‘He’s not an alcoholic; he just has a little drinking problem.’ He would come home at night usually, fairly bombed, and not ever hit me [or her mother], but he could be loud and abusive, and occasionally break up furniture, put his fist through walls.”

Her father, Roger Williams, nevertheless influenced her career. He owned an electrical wiring business but his passion was opera, transmitting his love of music and theater to her. He sang part time with Houston Grand Opera, “and I think that was part of the reason that he drank. He was bitter he didn’t pursue his career.” He died of a heart attack when she was 16.

Even though she sang and performed as a child, and loved it, when she got to Brown, she “decided I would be very serious and not do any acting.” Williams thought she would become a psychologist. But soon she was tapped for student productions--”it was a wonderful time to be there; a lot of guerrilla theater and political theater”--and then worked at Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence, R.I., rising quickly from apprentice to ingenue.

She moved to New York and met Pasquin when he cast her in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Daughter-in-Law” at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J. But they did not become a couple until after she worked with him off-Broadway on “Moonchildren.”

Then came the trauma of trying to have children and suffering four miscarriages. In a weird twist, she was about to play surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead on “Baby M” when her lawyer phoned to say that Will, then 3 days old, was available for adoption. She and Pasquin were present at the birth of their second son--”and John and I cut the cord.”

Williams feels that her own family’s alcoholic background and a bout of depression in not being able to bear children give her a particular edge in the role.

She sees her future in directing. “I think women are particularly well-equipped,” says Williams, whose “On Love” received an Oscar nomination this year as best live-action short film. “They tend to be more aware of people’s feelings, what’s going on around them. . . . Particularly as a mother--I run a household, I raise two children, I want to get these guys to do what I need them to do in a way where they’ll be happy. And that’s a tremendous amount of directing skill.”

* “John Grisham’s the Client” airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).