The Role of a Lifetime : In Hungary, L.A. Actress McKee Anderson Teaches Police How to Treat the Bad Guys

Not so long ago, Wladyslaw Szylkin was a hard-nosed cop with a proud career chasing murderers, rapists and thugs along Poland’s western border. Then, he met McKee Anderson, a struggling Los Angeles actress who has taken up teaching at the FBI-run police academy here.

If only the tough guys back home could have witnessed what came next.

The strapping detective entered Anderson’s lecture hall clutching a small handbag, understated and chic to boot. His thick, puckered lips were shaded a sumptuous red, indubitably Chanel or Princess Borghese. His hair was blond and suggestive, and he professed a deep craving for the posteriors of his male classmates--his raw grip sampling a few.

“Don’t forget the boobs,” Anderson instructed, augmenting his proportions with wads of shredded law enforcement documents. “We need to make you beautiful.”

Szylkin is among 30 select police officers from Poland and Ukraine attending an eight-week training program in democratic policing at the U.S.-funded International Law Enforcement Academy here in the Hungarian capital. The course includes a three-day lesson on “Human Dignity in Policing” led by Anderson and a New York sociologist.

The Polish detective is also among a surprising cast of cops from the former Soviet bloc who have been willing to do most anything--even “feel the pain of a prostitute” by dressing in drag--to earn the recognition and adulation of the school’s wildly popular Hollywood castaway.

“If I had met McKee when I was young and handsome, I would have told her, ‘McKee, you are irresistible,’ ” said Yuriy Serediuk, a bald, burly Ukrainian officer cast by the actress as a strung-out drug addict, complete with syringe, tourniquet and an overcoat soiled in the academy’s flower garden.

“I am irresistible, too, diabolically so,” he toyed in his best theatrical voice. “So why not try and give it a chance?”

“Oh, you guys!” a spellbound Anderson gushed in return.

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It doesn’t matter to these beefy fans that their Hollywood starlet is well past 40 (she is old enough to be the mother of more than a few of her admirers) and unfamiliar to most audiences outside their third-floor lecture hall. Nor does anyone mind that Anderson’s most memorable acting moment came almost seven years ago when she was devoured by a flesh-eating zombie in the 1990 remake of “Night of the Living Dead.” She also appeared once on “Cagney & Lacey” and “CHiPS,” but neither hit it big behind the Iron Curtain.

“They ask if I know Sharon Stone, or if I’ve seen Arnold [Schwarzenegger] lately,” Anderson said on a break from teaching. “The answer is always, ‘No. No.’ ”

But what the loquacious brunet lacks in conventional stardom, her devotees in law enforcement say, she supplies in an unconventional knack for turning the tiniest moment into great educational theater. Who else, one of them asked, could mold classroom after classroom of swaggering cops into unabashed thespians--all without the benefit of a common language?

“At first we didn’t know how the police would take to McKee,” said Raymond Pitt of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which developed the human dignity course five years ago but never employed a woman or an actress as instructor. “She is attractive, intelligent and has a hands-on approach that is quite disarming. It turned out to be a breakthrough. They love the course and they love McKee.”

Pitt is not just a casual observer; he is the man in charge, though that is often a difficult post to maintain when sharing the rostrum with a campus celebrity. Every 10 weeks, the avuncular, snowy-haired sociologist shuts down his therapy practice in New York City to take command of the Budapest dignity session, which kicks off two months of classes in the do’s and don’ts of law enforcement in Western democracies.

More than 400 mid-level police officers from 19 formerly Communist countries have taken advantage of the FBI training since 1995, with subjects ranging from computer-assisted criminal investigations to the staging of airport drug busts.

But Anderson is the only actress on staff--she began assisting Pitt last year--and the human dignity offering the only program to employ the much-talked-about “sociodramas” that have become her genius.

“Bar none, the students have all found the technique unusual but satisfying,” said FBI agent Leslie Kaciban, director of the academy. “Acting was always part of the scenario, but [Anderson] has made it more dynamic.”

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With the assistance of translators, Anderson huddles with small groups of police officers, putting together skits that illustrate the course’s main theme: Professional policing in democratic societies requires treating both good and bad guys with dignity and fairness, no matter how distasteful that may seem. The actress helps develop brief story lines, offers performance tips and combs the police academy for props and wardrobes.

“I just tell them to speak the truth, and the most amazing things happen,” said Anderson, who has been known to burst into tears during performances. “There is a strong tradition of storytelling in Central and Eastern Europe, so I just have to get them past their first feeling, ‘I am going to make a fool of myself.’ ”

In the case of Szylkin’s prostitute, the groups were required to choose “pariahs”--people police officers detest and find difficult to treat fairly--and present them in a sympathetic light.

In other exercises, the students act out examples of police abuses against civilians and other police, and take the stage as real-life “champions of human dignity,” historical figures such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who impart wisdom to authorities from the new democracies.

“We start with the assumption that police are good actors, who in the course of their work have to threaten, cajole and implore,” said Pitt, who has taught the class to cops from New York City to Honduras. “Then McKee just gets into it--sometimes so much that I have to say, ‘Let’s get on with it!’ But that is about as far as I can go when it comes to reining in McKee.”

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Anderson sets the tone for the session in the first hour. Her ears buried in a headset for simultaneous translation, she steps to the podium in black pumps, and with a wide smile and the anticipation of a high school cheerleader keyed up for homecoming. Every eye in the room is staring her way.

“I am n-o-t married. I have n-o kids, but two cats that I love,” she announces with a flirtatious twist of the brow. “And I live in L.A.--Hoooooollywood!”

In the course of the coming days, the Beachwood Canyon resident breaks virtually every teacher-student taboo--touching, caressing, hugging and kissing her actors into character. When one officer arrives the second morning with a newly shaved head and cropped beard, she abruptly stops the lesson to admire his good looks.

“I thought you would like it better,” the police officer confides to a classroom of laughter.

For Anderson, the job is fun and fills a hole in her life. She just finished a dramatic role in an independent Los Angeles film, “Chocolate for Breakfast,” and has spent the past three years writing a play about the late Dian Fossey, the gorilla researcher. But Hollywood and Broadway are not pounding at her door, she laments, leaving her to create a dramatic world of her own.

“There are hundreds of us in SAG [Screen Actors Guild] making less than $10,000 a year fighting for parts with a couple lines,” said Anderson, as several of Eastern Europe’s finest rehearsed a rape scene in the next room. “Even when you get work and read the lines, you say, ‘This is what it is all about?’ So I have had to make a niche for myself, something that allows me to use my talent and years of training.

“Would I rather be on Broadway? Sure, that is the ultimate. But even if I were a full-fledged movie star, I would never stop this. I think I have done some of my best work as an actress in these classrooms.”

Anderson, who spent her adolescence overseas as the daughter of an Air Force officer, said training police from formerly totalitarian regimes has also reawakened a deep patriotism that she had long ago forgotten. “We are the warm-up act for these guys, there is no question about it,” she said. “But we are also ambassadors; it is like giving them a souvenir of America.”

For Szylkin, the Polish detective, it is a souvenir he expects to put to use in Poland, where the police academy curriculum is mostly memorization and repetition and where role-playing is as distant as Hollywood itself. His eyes still smeared with mascara, Szylkin asks a reporter to send along a photograph of his performance--inspiration for the tough guys back home.