‘Mighty’ Puts Old Name Back in Spotlight : Movies: Woody Allen plays Lenny Weinrib in his latest film, a moniker he thought he made up. So what happened to mid-’60s writer-actor-comedian Lennie Weinrib?

There’s Lenny Weinrib, a love-muddled sportswriter character written by Woody Allen, played by Woody Allen in his new film, “Mighty Aphrodite.”

Then there’s Lennie Weinrib, a rising Hollywood writer-actor-comedian in the mid-’60s who’s dropped out of view in recent years.

Through his publicist, Allen says he’d never heard of Lennie-with-an-ie Weinrib and calls the whole thing a coincidence.

But the name will ring a bell with many Hollywood veterans. Warm, heavy-set and full of gusto, Weinrib was a hard-working, versatile young performer who moved between stage, screen and television.

A man of wide-ranging experience and an alumnus of UCLA’s motion picture division, he produced and directed low-budget teen flicks, worked with Carol Channing in Las Vegas and recorded a comedy album.

One of his earliest successes was as a member of the Billy Barnes Revue, the first of a series of revues developed by the protean Barnes (who’s currently engaged in his own one-man show) that enlivened the ‘60s with their wit and sophistication.

Above all, Weinrib developed a lucrative career as a voice-over actor and now lives in retirement in Santiago, Chile. Reached by phone, he said he’d seen Allen perform many times in New York in the 1960s but never met him.

“When I was on Broadway in the Billy Barnes Revue I went to the Bon Soir to see Woody like everyone else did. I can remember one line in particular,” he says, continuing in a dead-on Allen imitation: “ ‘I saw my ex-wife last week, and I didn’t recognize her. It was the first time I ever saw her without her palms out.’ ”

Weinrib says physical problems caused him to retire and move to South America.

“In 1992 I had advanced arthritis of the hips and my doctors were worried about operating on a heavy guy like me,” says Weinrib, 60. “I got so I couldn’t walk to jobs anymore, so my wife, Sonia, who is from Chile, and I decided to retire there and be near her family.”

He says that by the time he was 30 he had become one of the top 10 voice-over talents working in commercials.

“Made a quarter of a million every year for years. Spent it on Rolls-Royces, boats, first editions, guns, knives. Never thought about money,” he says. “Did about 100 cartoons, Olympia beer, McDonald’s commercials. I was Mr. Pringle of Pringle’s potato chips.”

He eventually ran into money problems but credits his friend Ron Feinberg, an actor with business savvy, with repairing his finances. That allowed Weinrib and his wife, whom he married in 1983, and their two daughters, Gracie and Heidi, to make the move to Chile, where they live on Weinrib’s pensions in Las Condes, a pleasant Santiago neighborhood.

And Weinrib says he found “the best doctor in Chile” to operate on his hips. He now uses a walker, is becoming more active and hopes to walk again one day without aid.

“Losing money is not what’s important,” Weinrib says. “What’s important is being able to walk with my daughters on the beach.”