A Knight With Noble Intentions : Shirley Knight has picked up her share of stage, film and TV accolades, but it’s the inner rewards in her acting career that keep her satisfied.

Actress Shirley Knight has never been one to go with the Hollywood flow.

A Midwestern girl who came to Los Angeles in the late 1950s with no acting experience beyond a few college shows, she landed a studio contract and an Oscar nomination within a year of setting foot in California. Shortly after that, she left Tinseltown for less glitzy pursuits in the Eastern theater and elsewhere.

Yet even major interruptions didn’t prevent Knight from going on to collect a Tony, two Emmys and five additional Emmy nominations, another Academy Award nomination, two Golden Globes and many more accolades in a career that has spanned more than three decades in theater, film and television.

The key, Knight says, is that she has picked her projects not for the career glory they might bring her but for their inherent meaning, both personal and social.

“That’s been my way from the beginning,” says the actress, dressed casually in a red sweater and black leggings, as she sits in the living room of her West Hollywood home. “Certain things speak to you, and other things don’t.”

This week, Knight appears alongside her daughter Kaitlin Hopkins in George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” The L.A. Theatre Works live radio theater production--which will be taped for later broadcast on KCRW-FM (89.9)--plays Wednesday through Saturday at the Doubletree Guest Suites hotel in Santa Monica.

Shaw’s 1894 comedy--which focuses on the mother-daughter relationship played by Knight and Hopkins, as well as the issue of prostitution--is about a Cambridge-educated math whiz who bristles when she finds out how her mother paid for her schooling.

Call it the result of growing up the daughter of a dirt farmer who bootstrapped himself up from poverty in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, but Knight has always been sensitive to society’s inequities.

“In a way, one doesn’t have a choice about the person that you are,” she says. “I guess I’m a great cause person. I hate injustice and greed.”

Knight, 59, was born in Mitchell, Kan. (“a little, teeny place, which had 13 houses, one school and one church”) and “never even saw movies as a child, let alone television or theater.”

Inspired by her English mother’s love of music--and family Saturdays spent listening to the Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcasts--Knight originally intended to pursue a career as an opera singer.

She won a music scholarship to Phillips University in Enid, Okla. But during the first year of her studies--when Knight went to hear a Maria Callas concert--she decided that she could never be as good as the famed diva and changed her plans.

Knight returned to Kansas, transferring to Wichita State University, and began to study journalism. She got a job first at the Wichita Beacon, then at a local TV station.

Meanwhile, Knight had developed an interest in theater. So when she spotted a magazine ad for a six-week acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse, she got on a train headed west.

“They divided you up into three groups, and they put me in the lowest group,” she recalls with a chuckle. So, to be safe, Knight applied and was accepted to study journalism at UCLA.

Before she could begin classes, however, fate intervened. Accompanying her then-roommate, Jo Anne Worley, on an audition in 1959, the inexperienced Knight found herself cast in the lead of an episode of a TV show called “NBC Matinee Theatre.”

From that, the budding actress got an agent. She decided to stay in Los Angeles, enrolled in acting classes and, later that year, performed alongside Dean Stockwell in a small theater production of “Look Back in Anger.”

On the basis of her performance in that play, she ended up taking a contract with Warner Bros.

“I did ‘The Dark at the Top of the Stairs’ and was nominated for an Oscar--and this was within a year of my coming to Los Angeles,” she says, referring to the 1960 film version of William Inge’s play.

“Obviously, it was what I was supposed to be doing,” says the actress, who was nominated again for 1962’s “Sweet Bird of Youth.” “Otherwise, I would have gone to UCLA and become a journalist.”

In 1964, Knight appeared off-Broadway in LeRoi Jones’ “Dutchman.” That same year, she made her Broadway debut in Lee Strasberg’s staging of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters.”

Knight moved to New York in 1965 and continued to work in the theater. Four years later, she married English playwright John Hopkins and relocated to England.

The couple returned to New York in the mid-’70s, and Knight began working regularly in the New York theater again. She won a Tony for her work in Robert Patrick’s “Kennedy’s Children” in 1975.

Since then, she has continued to perform in New York and regionally. In 1980, she performed in Manhattan in the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” and in 1984, she returned to the same theater in “Come Back, Little Sheba.” In 1992, she appeared at the Alley Theatre in Houston in Edward Albee’s “Marriage Play.”

But since most people can’t make a living in theater these these days, Knight has lately worked more in film and television. Accordingly, she and her husband, who is also a screenwriter, moved back to Los Angeles three years ago.

“We sold our house in the East, mainly because the theater is dead,” Knight says. She has, however, kept just as busy here. Knight has turned in well-received performances at the Matrix and other L.A. theaters and last year she won Emmys for her role in “Indictment: The McMartin Trial” and a guest appearance on “NYPD Blue.”

In addition to her acting, Knight teaches, and she recently wrote and directed “Far From Home,” a half-hour musical film about the homeless, made under the auspices of the American Film Institute’s program for female directors and featuring her daughter in the cast.

The topic is, of course, in keeping with Knight’s penchant for mixing social concerns with her work. But that kind of belief in the enterprise, she says, is what keeps her going.

“When I teach acting,” Knight says, “one of the main things I say is: ‘Be careful of why you’re doing what you’re doing. Be careful of the food that you choose to sustain you, because if the food that you choose is that you want to be rich or famous, you’re going to starve to death spiritually.’

“Even if that comes to you,” she adds, “it comes to you for only a moment in time, and you won’t be sustained. You have to be sure that the reason that you’ve chosen to do it is because of what it does in terms of your own artistic spirit--and that what makes you go on is the joy of doing it and becoming better at it.”

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“MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION”: Doubletree Guest Suites, 1707 4th St., Santa Monica. Dates: Wednesday to Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $22-$25. Phone: (310) 827-0889.