She’s no movie star

IF you are going to have your purse stolen in the middle of an interview with a movie star, you would do well to ensure that the movie star is Catherine Keener.

Because while you are staring in bovine disbelief at the space where your purse was just 10 minutes ago, Keener hops up to inform the owner of the downtown cafe where the crime occurred and then convinces you to take a walk through the only slightly gentrified streets along skid row to see if maybe the thief just took the money and dumped the rest in an accommodating alley or a garbage can.

She pokes through trash bins with you, and when a young, highly tattooed gentleman taps her on the shoulder, she looks up eagerly, as if expecting news of the purse. “We just wanted you to know that we loved you in ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin,’ ” he says, motioning to his girlfriend standing nearby. Keener appears disappointed and a bit confused, as if she has forgotten, for a moment, that she is a very successful actress with four films out this year, not just some nice woman whose companion’s purse was stolen. “Oh, right,” she says after a beat, with a sincere and lovely smile. “Well, thank you very much.”

Then she tugs you toward a group of homeless people congregating under the few trees that mark the intersection of 3rd and Main streets and suggests that the two of you talk to them. Describe the purse, explain that whoever finds it can keep the money if they will just return the credit cards and car keys, the cellphone and pictures.

She doesn’t understand why you don’t think this is a good idea. Because when it comes right down to it, the woman would rather sift through garbage and chat with junkies than talk about her career.

Catherine Keener has an uneasy relationship with success. At least as it is defined by the entertainment industry, where success is inextricably linked to fame just as the word “enough” is inevitably preceded by “never.” She rarely gives interviews and, though she does not want anyone to take it personally, she would rather not be doing one now. But she has had a pretty big year, with four films, including the critically acclaimed “Capote,” in which she plays “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee.

Still, in Hollywood, there is always a certain group of actors that is considered “underappreciated.” People like Frances McDormand, Patricia Clarkson, Kevin Bacon, Joan Cusack and Paul Giamatti. Keener has spent most of her 15-year career as one of these people.

By industry definition, this means she regularly plays very good parts in very good movies but does not get leads in big studio films or make millions of dollars a minute. It means that, at 45, she is an Oscar-nominated actress whom critics love but who does not regularly appear on any “10 Most Whatever” list or every red carpet rolled out in town. That despite her great cheekbones and lanky, clothes-friendly frame, she has never shilled for a designer or a perfume company, has never decorated a billboard or a building, not even on the Sunset Strip.

Even with the success of “Virgin” and “Capote,” Keener’s fame remains at a manageable level. Though her separation from husband Dermot Mulroney was recently mentioned in Entertainment Weekly, the ability to spot her on the street is still indicative of a certain level of cinematic savvy, like being able to identify one of the Coen brothers in a photograph.

“No one knows who I am,” she says. “Well, hardly anyone. One time, I had this friend who was getting harassed by the paparazzi, so I arranged for a car to pick us up.... Anyway, in the confusion, I got left behind. So the car is driving away and I am standing there with a group of paparazzi and I say, ‘What exactly are you guys trying to achieve here?’ One of them starts talking to me, but the rest just run after the car. That’s the kind of star I am,” she says with a sudden husky laugh. “Paparazzi run from me.”

The critics are another story; read a review of any film Keener has ever been in, including the duds, and there is inevitably the Keener parenthetical, in which the reviewer wonders why it is studios don’t put her in bigger vehicles.

Keener, on the other hand, doesn’t find this strange at all.

“The big secret is I’m not movie star material,” Keener says as she walks along the streets of downtown a couple of weeks after the fateful Purse Incident. “I’m costar material. I’m supporting material. Those are the roles I like. And I just want to keep making the movies I like, even though,” she says, “hardly anyone goes to see them.”

Keener has very green eyes and a big easy laugh that comes often, sometimes mid-sentence. She is even prettier in person than she is on screen, which is unusual, and she seems instantly very familiar. But not in a famous person way. More like the coolest mom in the playgroup, or that woman at work you wish you knew. Which is sort of the role she winds up playing in most movies -- a woman who may be troubled or even manipulative but is still somehow extremely likable.

When she talks about the movies “that no one goes to see,” it is important to keep in mind that this isn’t the way actors normally speak of their careers and it isn’t really true. By any actor’s lights, Keener has had a very high-profile year. “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” grossed more than $100 million, and “Capote” promises to be an award season favorite for all concerned, including Keener. She also played Sean Penn’s partner in “The Interpreter,” a big-budget thriller, and Daniel Day-Lewis’ girlfriend in “The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” a well-received family drama by Arthur Miller’s daughter Rebecca.

But it is true that Keener’s place in the cinematic landscape is still characterized by small independent films like “Being John Malkovich” (for which she received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination), “Walking and Talking” and “Lovely & Amazing.” Directed by Nicole Holofcener, herself a member of the underappreciated club, these last two films were small but generally considered close to perfect.

Mention this to Keener and she will agree but in a way that seems to actually have nothing to do with her.

“Oh, that’s totally Nicole,” says Keener. “She is amazing. I will do anything she asks.”

In fact, Keener’s next role will be in Holofcener’s “Friends With Money,” which also stars Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand and, more important, at least according to the marketing department, Jennifer Aniston. And there it is, in call-sheet form: Hollywood fame, in all its strange and seemingly arbitrary glory.

There are reasons that Keener isn’t considered the box-office draw that Aniston is, and most of them have nothing to do with age or hair quality or even the powerhouse that was “Friends.”

In a town built on face time, Keener doesn’t play the meet-and-greet game. She says she is happy to talk about specific projects with anyone concerned, but taking a meeting that’s about some A-lister talking endlessly about him/herself? “I usually give it 45 minutes and then I’m like, ‘Well, thanks, but I gotta go pick up my kid.’ ”

Even when it is about a project she’s interested in, she says, she doesn’t ever seem to know how to say the things people want to hear. When she met with “Capote” director Bennett Miller, for instance, she almost blew her chance despite glowing recommendations from Spike Jonze.

“Bennett didn’t know me,” she says. “He had come to California to meet with me. We’re sitting at a bar and he’s drinking green tea or something and I have two glasses of champagne because I’m nervous and he keeps saying, ‘I just want you to reassure me that this will be all right.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t do that because I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep.’ ” She laughs, at herself, at the folly of the process, because it’s easy to laugh now that the movie is a success. “I told him I would do my best and I thought it would work, but I think he hired me just so I would shut up.”

She wanted “Capote” because she loved Philip Seymour Hoffman and the leanness of the script, but she isn’t one of these people who likes a lot of movies. She isn’t crazy about most of the scripts she sees -- “not that I see all that many” -- and, she says, she has never, not once, seen a movie “where I thought, dang, that one should have been mine.”

“I’m not the studio’s gal,” Keener says matter-of-factly. “And that’s OK, because the studio’s not my guy either -- which isn’t a good way to put it since a lot of the executives these days are women, but you know what I mean. And I see their point -- I’m not the most beautiful chick they could find, I don’t have this big ‘image.’

“With me,” she says, unleashing another wide-open laugh, “the expectation is a bit lower. Very freeing.”

No self-promoter

In its own way, this sort of success takes as much work as the other, higher-octane form. Because the pull is always there -- to do more, to pose for the camera, sit for the interviews, to put yourself out there, make the big time, the A-list, happen. And Keener does have moments when she wonders if she shouldn’t promote herself more.

“Sometimes I think maybe I should just kick myself in the butt,” she says. “But I don’t know. I know a lot of famous people. And let me tell you, fame is not what it’s cracked up to be.”

For one thing, famous people have to do a lot more press, and Keener doesn’t like doing press. “My friends get mad at things they read about themselves, and I say, ‘You know what? It’s not rocket science. Don’t do press.’ ”

Within the spectrum of Hollywood personalities, Keener definitely falls on the “real person” end. She is hand-holdingly friendly, lavish in her praise of others and mindful of the importance of other people’s time. For a photo shoot, she does her own hair and makeup; her only visible beauty aid is a ponytail holder with lime green plastic balls on either end, the kind girls used to wear in grade school.

She will happily dish on the quirks of her peers -- demonstrating how women blow air through their lips to make them appear fuller for photo shoots and exclaiming over the fact that some tweak their nipples to make them “perkier” -- but the only time her tone is critical is when she talks about people who make “too much money” and then don’t put in the work. “I mean,” she says darkly, “if you’re going to accept millions of dollars for a role you should have the decency to show up on time and put in a full day’s work.”

The money, and the power it represents, is a good reminder that as real as she might be, Keener is, after all, a successful member of a highly paid, highly regarded industry. Yes, she has an affinity for downtown because she and Mulroney lived for years in Los Feliz, but it was in a big house in a gated community. And now she lives on the Westside, to be near her son’s school.

And that paragraph is probably one reason Keener avoids doing press -- no one wants to be characterized, and at a certain point in any story the details must give way to characterization. “This is why I love junkets,” she says, making her possibly the single person in Hollywood to ever utter these words. “I mean, they’re so easy. Three minutes, five minutes with each person, big smile, direct questions, then on to the next.”

It’s the sitting down and talking about herself as if she were somehow significant that bothers her.

“I know people who want to do something no one has ever done before,” she says, “who push themselves to do something no one has ever done before. As if that will make them matter or something. But I look at them and think, ‘And then what?’ ”

Keener is sitting in the middle of the Basquiat exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, talking in whispers. It is a fitting place to discuss the vagaries of success, surrounded by the bright scrawling wonder of an artist who didn’t survive it. Flea, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, wanders by, as does “Hill Street Blues” star Veronica Hamel -- this is L.A. after all -- and Keener debates greeting either one, decides against it. “Isn’t she beautiful?” she whispers, watching out of the corner of her eye as Hamel passes.

Meanwhile, people pass her with the same sort of look. This year has raised her profile quite a bit, she admits, and there is that talk of an Oscar nomination for “Capote.” Talk that she waves away, literally, as if it were a gnat. “That is really none of my business. I really believe that. I mean, you do the work and you hope people get it. But you have no control....”

Even after 15 years in the business, Keener says she feels like an outsider, or maybe a visitor. She came to Los Angeles via New York from Florida, where it never occurred to her to be an actress or visit Hollywood. After college she got a job as an assistant to a casting director, which is how she wound up here, and it all still seems amazingly accidental. “I’m not from here,” she says. “There is so much distance between where I’m from and here that sometimes it doesn’t seem real.

“I have a great career, have met and worked with all these great people. And someone would think I want more?” She shakes her head.

She understands how it happens, though, how a perfectly nice person with a talent for acting, or directing, or music making builds a big career and in doing so loses much of who they were to begin with. “I see it happen with people I like,” she says. “They feel manipulated, by the press, by the system, and they start to manipulate back. Like, ‘OK, I’ll do what you ask, but I want this and this and this.’ ... But still I want to shake them and say, ‘What does it matter if you turn into someone you don’t even like?’ ”

In a way, this is the essential theme of “Capote,” with Keener playing the self-contained Harper Lee to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acclaim-seeking Truman Capote. It is a subdued role, a bit outside Keener’s previous mix-and-match spectrum of sexy, neurotic, bitchy, needy, goofy and sweet. For her, the moment of truth is when Lee realizes that her childhood friend is not only making choices she would never make, he’s also becoming someone she doesn’t know, and isn’t sure she likes.

“It’s so hard when that happens,” Keener says. “When a friend crosses a line that maybe you didn’t even know was there.”

Despite the often-incestuous nature of the business, Keener did not know Hoffman before she began work on “Capote.” So in an effort to form some sort of bond with him before they began playing childhood friends, Keener persuaded him to take a train ride with her. She bought tickets in coach, and when the two of them showed up in their preferred chosen-from-the-pile-on-the-floor wardrobe -- “this,” she says, gesturing to a flannel shirt and jeans, “is dressed up for me” -- the conductors made certain they did not linger in first class.

“They’re hustling us toward the back and Phil’s like, ‘All right, all right, we’re going.’ They had no idea who he was,” she throws back her head and laughs. “It was crazy.”

But the best part, she says, was when they were sitting on an observation platform on top of the train. “We were talking with this man whose wife had just died, and he was this train guy ... part of this group that traveled around the world riding on trains and he was taking this trip alone for the first time.” She shakes her head, admiringly. “People are just amazing sometimes. They really are.”