MOVIES : Off the Beaten Path : Most of Christopher Hampton’s work--even his biggest hit, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’--has been quirky, arty, small or period. So how come Hollywood is furiously chasing after him?

In all of Europe, there’s no filmmaker hotter than Christopher Hampton.

The facts speak for them selves. Hampton’s directing debut, “Carrington,” which he also wrote, won two prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival: one for actor Jonathan Pryce, the other for Hampton himself.

“Carrington,” the story of an unconventional love affair between two English bohemians, artist Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson) and pacifist homosexual critic Lytton Strachey (Pryce), opens Friday--one of three Hampton-scripted films being released before the end of the year.

“Total Eclipse,” with Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis (“Naked”) as 19th-Century French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, opened Friday; “Mary Reilly,” the Stephen Frears film that reworks the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story and stars Julia Roberts as Dr. Jekyll’s housekeeper, is due Dec. 25.

Now Hampton is making another film, his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Secret Agent,” set among a group of anarchists in 1880s London. It boasts an intriguing cast: Bob Hoskins, Gerard Depardieu, Patricia Arquette and Jim Broadbent.

There’s more. Hampton has signed a first-look deal with 20th Century Fox for about $2 million; under its terms he will write two films and direct one of them. He has also delivered a script based on Neil Sheehan’s Vietnam book “A Bright Shining Lie” to Oliver Stone, and an adaptation of Donna Tartt’s bestseller “The Secret History” to Alan J. Pakula.

Remember, too, that Hampton picked up two Tony awards this year, for his collaboration with Don Black for the lyrics and book of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Sunset Boulevard”--based on Billy Wilder’s legendary movie.

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At the age of 49, it seems, Hampton is suddenly everywhere. Those who have only a nodding acquaintance with the film business might conclude he has apparently emerged from nowhere. In fact he won an Oscar in 1989 for his script of Frears’ film “Dangerous Liaisons,” which Hampton adapted from his own stage play “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” But it is also fair to say Hampton’s Oscar win ushered in a long spell of career frustrations that ended only this year.

To his surprise Hollywood did not fall at his feet because of his Oscar; for five years not one film was made from his well-crafted, hugely literate scripts.

Hampton mused over the fluctuations in his film career at his office in London’s Ealing Studios, where “The Secret Agent” is being shot.

“I was a bit disillusioned when it first happened,” he says of his failure to follow up “Dangerous Liaisons” quickly. “I thought an Oscar must count for something. But I came to understand it’s a giant roulette game, writing films.”

“Carrington” finally turned his fortunes around. It was the only entry at Cannes this year to win two awards, and Hampton’s special jury prize for writing and directing was recognition of his talents in more than one field.

Yet two ironies lie behind this triumph. One is that he wrote “Carrington” in 1977 and waited vainly for Warner Bros. to make it into a prestige, big-budget film.

“In the end, I needed some drastic reordering and compressing in the film’s final section,” Hampton says. “But the script that was filmed was essentially the same as the one I wrote in 1977.”

In the intervening years, studios became increasingly wedded to films with clear resolutions and upbeat endings. With a death and a suicide at its end, “Carrington” hardly fit the bill.

“All my works are hard sells,” Hampton says with a sigh. “Even an executive who really liked it said it made him feel like going home and hitting himself with a baseball bat. I see his point. It’s not supposed to make people dance in the street.”

Warner Bros. finally ceded the rights to “Carrington” to the British company Thames, which then allowed Hampton’s production company to reacquire them. The film could then be made in Britain, though clearly not on a big Hollywood budget.

The second irony is that Hampton only directed the film by default; Mike Newell quit shortly before shooting started, citing plans to work in America. He had just completed one little British film, he told Hampton, and had no patience to tackle another. (That “little” film was “Four Weddings and a Funeral”; Newell could not have predicted its success.)

“I never sought to be a director,” Hampton says. “After Mike dropped out we frantically interviewed other name directors, none of whom was free at such short notice.” But his French producer Philippe Carcassonne, who had secured just under $6 million from PolyGram to make “Carrington,” called him one evening to hint that it was commonplace in France for writers to direct their own movies.

“The next day, coincidentally, Emma Thompson called to express exactly the same point of view,” Hampton adds. “This was a long-cherished project, and I began to think perhaps I’d better do it.”

From these diffident beginnings, a sparkling new career was hatched. Yet Hampton’s first reaction to taking the directing job concerned the extent it threw his life into chaos: “I already had work to do, a film and a play to write. So I had to sit up night after night and get them done first.”

But once he embarked on “Carrington,” it was clear he had his own ideas. It may be a period drama, and the British film industry has adapted a glut of period dramas, but its style is at a polar extreme from, say, the output of Merchant Ivory.

“Of course, my original script preceded that glut,” Hampton notes. “I kept the camera as mobile as possible and tried to focus on characters, not background. If you see a nice shiny 1920s car, it’s because it plays a part in the plot, not because it’s pleasant to see it trundling down a road.”

The stylistic gamble worked, and the Cannes success of “Carrington” has propelled Hampton headlong into a new life as a director. He is suddenly a major player, a Wunderkind.

Prodigies are by their nature far from commonplace, and Christopher Hampton looked a unique proposition when he first strode confidently into the limelight some 30 years ago.

He was still at Oxford University and only 20 when his play “When Did You Last See My Mother?” was produced, first at London’s Royal Court theater, then in the West End, before an Off Broadway run. He wrote “Total Eclipse,” his next play, when he was just 21. Clearly he had a remarkable mind; he earned a degree in modern languages, used to translate classic European texts and started work as literary manager to the Royal Court on the day he graduated from Oxford.

At the venerable age of 24, Hampton had a critical and popular West End hit in 1970 with his brilliant comedy “The Philanthropist.” It confirmed him not just as a formidable intellect but also as Britain’s best young dramatist.

This frenzied action started what could have been a dazzling career as a playwright; all he had to do was stay on track, bask in the glow of celebrity and enjoy a “kid genius” reputation into middle age.

It didn’t happen that way. Hampton retreated into the bosom of the Royal Court, wrote plays quite different from and less commercial than “The Philanthropist” and tried his hand at film scripts. In the 25 years since his first three plays marked him as a young man going places fast, long quiet periods have been punctuated by bursts of isolated attention.

His early eminence may have given him an ambivalent attitude to success, or at least to fame; he seems faintly amused by games of celebrity one-upmanship practiced in the film industry.

“I’ve seen him at power breakfasts in Los Angeles with studio heads, taking a wry look at that Hollywood nonsense,” says his “Sunset Boulevard” collaborator Don Black. Not that Hampton would be haughty to his hosts; meeting him, you expect to be intimidated by his intellect but you come away struck by his niceness.

“I thought he was awesome at first,” Black notes. “He’s an egghead, very bright and well-read. I’ve written lyrics for 30 years and thought it took years to hone the craft, to know what it’s about. It took Chris about 20 minutes, which was unsettling. But he’s down-to-earth and ordinary, and I mean that as a compliment.”

Yet little in Hampton’s early years was down-to-earth or ordinary. He spent a large chunk of his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father was an engineer; he wrote about this period in his autobiographical play “White Chameleon.”

At age 10 during the Suez crisis, he was spat upon by Egyptian classmates for being English. Evacuated to an English prep school, he was then berated by classmates for airing pro-Egyptian views. The experience bred a certain detachment in Hampton, a disdain for dogma exemplified by the much-quoted line by the main character in “The Philanthropist”: “My problem is I’m a man of no convictions. At least, I think I am.”

At Lancing school, where his contemporaries were playwright David Hare and lyricist Tim Rice, Hampton wrote a novel rejected by every publisher he approached. “When Did You Last See My Mother?” was completed before he went to Oxford; while there he took a year off, lived a writer’s life in Paris and Hamburg, Germany, and wrote “Total Eclipse.” Back at Oxford, he completed his degree, then started “The Philanthropist.”

At this point his agent, Peggy Ramsay, offered Hampton some defining career advice. As he recalls: “She said, ‘You can keep on writing plays like this one, dear, one a year for the next 20 years. Or you can do something different.’ To me it seemed riskier and more interesting not to go down one path.”

To date this has been the guiding principle behind his work. Hampton confesses: “I’ve always courted difficulty and had been attracted by difficult subjects or conundrums. Why else would you choose to adapt a book for the stage in which the protagonists never meet?”

Indeed. A 19th-Century epistolary French novel seems unpromising terrain, but “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” was one of the most acclaimed plays of the ‘80s in London and on Broadway. Then as the film “Dangerous Liaisons” it became a box-office smash that won three Oscars.

Norma Heyman, who produced that film and the current “Secret Agent,” is not surprised by Hampton’s success: “He’s so good at absorbing ideas, and he writes better roles for women than any screenwriter alive. His perceptions of women are second to none. Look at the extraordinary depth he gave in ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ to Glenn Close’s and Michelle Pfeiffer’s characters.

“As for this new film, Conrad’s not a writer who spent too much time on dialogue. But Chris created dialogue in keeping with the spirit of the novel. He’s adapted it extraordinarily.”

Hampton’s projects may have stalled in the past because they lacked commercial appeal, but suddenly, with this year’s three films and “The Secret Agent,” “A Bright Shining Lie” and “The Secret History” to come, the floodgates are open. Yet though he is now being strongly courted as a director, he is keeping his new career in perspective: “Some subjects I like to write but wouldn’t direct. The idea of directing ‘A Bright Shining Lie,’ with lots of helicopters, scares me to death.”

In fact, Heyman says, Hampton took to directing effortlessly: “I was surprised it came so easily. But he enjoyed ‘Carrington.’ As he was making it,” she adds, deadpan, “he became slimmer, taller and younger. He really appreciated the joy of communicating his ideas directly to actors.”

Now Hampton also plans to direct a film of his play “White Chameleon.” But it must wait. “I thought I’d better make three or four proper movies before indulging myself in making a film about my childhood,” he says casually.

This all represents a grueling schedule, even by Hollywood’s single-minded standards.

“I overwork and I’d like to slow down,” he says. “In my 20s I thought of myself as lazy. . . . I’ve painfully transformed myself from a layabout to a workaholic.”

What caused the change?

“A lot of my problems in the old days were about what I wanted to write. I’d spend a lot of time worrying.”

Now, Black says: “It’s as if he gets up, showers and says: ‘Let’s go to work.’ He sits down and just starts. It’s a job to him. There’s no visible inner angst with Christopher.”

If pressed, Hampton can work prodigiously fast. He wrote the first draft of “Mary Reilly” in three weeks. “It was a whirlwind,” he concedes. “When I’m two-thirds of the way through a script I disappear to a hotel in France or Italy to write. It’s the only way I have real concentration and there are no business calls. But I’m much more fastidious than I was. I wrote most of my first play in a pub.”

Now Hampton mostly works in a West London house where he once lived. He moved his family to a larger place two miles away. He and his wife, Laura, have been married 24 years; formerly a social worker, she is now taking an art history course at London University. Their two daughters are 20 and 18.

One wonders if he can maintain this happy balance between low-key domesticity in London and a punishing work rate in the service of Hollywood. If he stays successful, might he not be co-opted to direct the kind of commercial, banal entertainments Hollywood prefers?

Hampton grinned shyly at the prospect.

“This isn’t exactly Hollywood,” he says, gesturing at the walls of his Ealing office. “And if you do these little English films”--he smiled at the echo of Newell’s exasperated comment--”at least you have a chance of being left alone to make them your own way.” He smiles engagingly. “Which is all I want.”