Who Needs Fame and Fortune?

Sharp blue eyes peer out from beneath a casually cropped pixie mop of gray hair. A magnetic smile, set off by a dark tan, is both warm and savvy. Yet it’s Estelle Parsons’ unique voice--slightly gravelly, with penetrating timbre and distinctive inflection--that makes the most lasting impression. Mesmerizing yet earthy, it announces the actress’ quirky persona like a “Danger: Curves Ahead” sign on a mountain road.

Etched on the collective consciousness of the American TV audience as Roseanne’s cantankerous mom, Parsons is also remembered for her Oscar-winning performance in the landmark film “Bonnie and Clyde,” as well as such recent movies as “Looking for Richard.” Yet to those who’ve caught even a glimpse of her decades-long career in the theater, she is infinitely more.

First seen on a Los Angeles stage alongside Lotte Lenya in a 1960 production of “The Threepenny Opera,” the New York-based Parsons returns to the L.A. boards this week to head the cast of “The First Picture Show,” a musical theater piece by David and Ain Gordon, with music by Jeanine Tesori, that opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday. Originally commissioned and developed by the Taper, “The First Picture Show” is set in a retirement home for aging show-biz folks and tells the story of a former silent-film director named Anne First, played by Parsons. The multimedia work is a co-production with San Francisco’s ACT, where it was seen earlier this season, although without Parsons in the cast.

Professionally versatile and ever an independent thinker, Parsons, now 71, has consistently put artistic and personal fulfillment ahead of fame or money. She is one of the few veteran performers who, despite early success in Hollywood, has chosen to make the theater her primary home. And that commitment has even heightened in recent years, since she became artistic director of the Actors Studio in New York in 1997.

“Almost everybody is interested in fame and power, particularly men, and I’m really interested in performing,” explains the unaffected actress, whose keen wit and intelligence are readily apparent in conversation. “I don’t have the interest in fame and power. I was so upset when Gene Hackman came to Hollywood and then Dustin [Hoffman] and all those people. I couldn’t believe that everybody was going to just sit in the movies the rest of their lives.”

While Parsons knows the trade-offs, she has always found the theater more satisfying.

“When you work in the theater, it’s the great leveler,” she says. “You’re only as good as you are in that rehearsal, and everybody’s standing around watching and judging you, and they treat you like a human being. It’s very hard to get used to that after the way you’re taken care of in film.

“I realized that if I did work I wanted to do--plays that might fail but that I was interested in doing--I disappointed all my fans that I had developed through the movies,” she says. “But I thought, I want to do what I want to do with my life. I don’t move backward, I move forward. I find getting through the day an exciting thing, and so I never had any historical perspective. I just want to work with good people and have a good time. I’m just interested, really, in living my life. I have no career sense at all.”

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“The First Picture Show,” which features the Gordons’ signature mix of dialogue and movement as well as music and film clips, takes as its topic the early female pioneers of the movie industry. Parsons’ character, the 99-year-old Anne First, is the focal point of the story, along with First’s great-great-niece, a documentary filmmaker who’s determined to film the older woman’s story.

Parsons was attracted to the project by the prospect of working in a theatrical technique that owes a debt to such political playwrights as Bertolt Brecht and Dario Fo, in whose works she has triumphed over the years. “Basically the style is what I’m really interested in,” she says. “You can’t really separate you and the character very much. The research doesn’t matter. Naturalistic things don’t matter. You basically just play at being, which gives you this wonderful freedom to play at being 99.”

Her facility with that style has not gone unnoticed. “She is an amazing, unpredictable actor,” David Gordon says. “The choices that she makes are not sentimental and not self-aggrandizing.

“One of the things that is important to me is that there is a kind of quality of thought and of taste [in a performance, and in the ensemble],” he says. “Different kinds of acting might have that kind of quality of thought and taste, and therefore the piece itself starts to be informed by the various styles of working. It’s very interesting to me that when you get dressed or make dinner that there’s a clinker you throw into the mix: Everything isn’t royal blue, or everything isn’t spicy. The same is true with actors in a play: The various styles begin to complement and frame each other, as long as we all understand what world we have entered. And Estelle is very good at clarifying the sense of the world and when we stumble out of it.”

“You don’t always know if she’s Anne or Estelle, because she’s always stirring that pot,” says Parsons’ fellow cast member Ken Marks, who with Parsons was part of the show when it was first workshopped in New York two years ago. “Her process is kind of a beautiful mystery and wonderful to watch. I’m always being surprised when I’m with her onstage. The responses are so immediate and so real that it’s a challenge to play on the same court.”

Parsons’ talent for non-naturalistic acting aside, she continues to develop her character even now. “I just started adding some things, like wearing earrings,” she says. “You see someone, 99, in a nursing home, right? She’s got an old lady’s shoes or slippers. She’s got an old baggy dress on, and you look like hell, right? But these women were all hotshots in the movies. They ran away from home when they were 15 and got to be successful director-producers. It was a wild and creative time. So this woman may be like this, but she’s going to still have the vestiges of this wild life she had.”

Although the piece is set in a retirement home, the primary topic, according to Parsons, is the evocation of the early days of filmmaking rather than Anne First’s later life. “I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with aging, really,” she says. “It’s just about how they were all in the movies and then they were gone, forgotten.”

Yet if aging is not the subject, it is an unavoidable subtext. “I found it very difficult playing a 99-year-old woman,” Parsons admits. “I would wake up in the morning [and think], ‘I can’t get up, I’m too old. What’s the matter with you? You’re not 99. Stop it, get up and live your life.’ It began to resonate that way with me, which I’d never expected.”

Parsons, however, is hardly one to give in to stereotypes about age. Indeed, she and her husband, attorney Peter Zimroth, adopted their son, now 16, when Parsons was in her mid-50s. (Parsons also has twin daughters, now in their 40s, from her first marriage, to the late writer Richard Gehman.)

Yet there’s no denying that the topic of aging has crossed the actress’ mind. “I worry about my brain functioning, because you get older, you get slower,” Parsons says. “You would be foolish if you thought you still could do what you did at 18 or even 30, physically, mentally, emotionally, anything. You see yourself on this journey through life, so the things you did very easily when you were younger and never thought about, you start thinking about. But I don’t want them to get in the way. I have to keep going. I’m really a fuller human being when I’m working. Somewhere deep down I love it, and it keeps me healthy.”

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Like her character, Parsons is both individualistic and resilient. Indeed, the casting of Parsons in this role is far more apt than may at first be apparent, for Parsons was also an Anne First in her own right, albeit in a different field.

Raised in New England, Parsons attended law school at Boston University for a brief while before setting out for Manhattan to pursue a career as a performer. This was during the early 1950s, and Parsons wound up becoming one of the first female television reporters. “I was in the beginning of morning television, and one of eight people to put together ‘The Today Show,’ ” she recalls.

The irony is that Parsons was a somewhat accidental pioneer. “Listen, I didn’t even want that job,” she says. “It was my 9-to-5 when I went to New York, because I was really a singer. I was singing with a band on weekends out on Great Neck, Long Island, and I just had this job, because what did I know about anything? And now everybody wants to be in television.”

Although her initial emphasis was on singing, Parsons found herself getting more work as a singing actress. “A singer really is what I wanted to be, and then I just kind of fell into straight acting,” she says. She made her Broadway debut in 1956, supporting Ethel Merman in a piece called “Happy Hunting.” Seven years later, she made her first film, “Ladybug Ladybug.”

But it was in 1967 that Parsons got her big break, when director Arthur Penn cast her as Clyde Barrow’s sister-in-law Blanche in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a performance for which she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress. “I first saw her in a theater in the Berkshires,” Penn recalls. “I thought she was a very talented actress, and I also found that she had a marvelous incipient hysteria. That was exactly what I was looking for for Blanche in ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’

“She’s intuitive but she’s also pretty methodical,” adds Penn, who has maintained a collegial relationship with Parsons since the 1960s. “She’s serious about her work and goes at it with intuition, but also with intelligence and a certain kind of diagnostic view of things.”

Also in 1967, Parsons starred opposite Anthony Quayle in a production of Brecht’s “Galileo” at Lincoln Center. The following year, she received her first of several Tony nominations, for Tennessee Williams’ “The Seven Descents of Myrtle.”

Since then, Parsons has continued to crop up on Broadway as well as in the movies, although it’s her outings in political works of which she seems most proud.

“I did a lot of musicals in the beginning, and I always thought I’d like to get more cutting-edge,” she says. “I think that’s why I went into ‘Miss Margarida’s Way,’ which was this Brazilian play about totalitarian power, and then I did the Dario Fo play [1983’s “Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From the Zoo”]. I love political theater.”

Of course, that doesn’t account for her most widely known recent work, in the recurring role of Bev Harris on the ABC series “Roseanne” between 1989 and 1997. That job was chosen primarily to enable Parsons to spend more time with her son. “I’ve never really tried to toil in the vineyards of TV, but I had a great time,” she says.

When “Roseanne” ended, Penn, who is president of the Actors Studio, convinced Parsons to assume the duties of artistic director at the venerable New York organization. “I turned out to be very good at it, which I should have known,” the actress says. “I should be doing that as a full-time job, but I refuse to give up acting.

“Lee [Strasberg], before he died, said, ‘You have got to teach.’ [I said] ‘I act, don’t bother me with all this.’ But you find that you know a lot of things as you get older. So it’s important to share those things.”

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“The First Picture Show,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 19. $29-$40. (213) 628-2772.