In `Bullets Over Broadway,' Wiest Takes A Shot At A Different Type Of Role

Dianne Wiest, all sweetness and nurturing light in most of her big-screen roles, makes a startling switch in her latest Woody Allen comedy. The result may be the wickedest, funniest performance she has given in her 14-year movie career.

Helen Sinclair, the aging, flirtatious, self-dramatizing 1920s actress Wiest plays in "Bullets Over Broadway" (opening here Friday), is wildly different from the maternal types usually associated with the actress.

So different that Wiest's voice and manner, not to mention her character's flamboyant taste in clothes, make her almost unrecognizable. Vain and mercenary, Helen is reminiscent of the people who populate Noel Coward's plays from the same period - especially "Hay Fever," with its theatrical family of shameless flirts who have such a grand time leading people on.

"Yes, but there's one difference," said Wiest, speaking by phone from New York. "The family in `Hay Fever' is enormously talented, and I don't think Helen Sinclair is. She makes such a show in order to atone for her lack of talent."

It's the kind of part Wiest has wanted for years, but she has had a rough time getting past the sweet characters in Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" (for which she won an Academy Award) and Ron Howard's "Parenthood" (which brought her another nomination).

"I've played these kinds of characters on stage, but I think Woody's the only one who would let me do it on film. It's just such a switch. Helen is such a disgusting woman, so self-centered and thoughtless and egomaniacal."

Allen even had her in mind while writing it: "I asked to be in his next film, and he just wrote the part for me. So now I know what he thinks of me!"

The first day of shooting did not go well. Wiest even considered dropping out, but Allen stayed with her until she figured it out.

"I didn't know how to do it. I thought I did, but during the first day's shooting I felt myself get worse and worse.

"The voice became the key to it. If I worked in a lower register I could be free to do it. I usually don't change my voice that much, but it became my lifeline. On stage I probably wouldn't have had as hard a time, because the voice is automatically big and dramatic. You have to hit the back row."

The clothes also helped her find the character: "There's that walk, which the costumes and the shoes make you have - and the hat, which only lets you turn a certain way. I'd walk and sit a different way."

Wiest said she can't think of a contemporary version of Sinclair, who seduces a young playwright (John Cusack) while she prattles on about the theater, "this church so replete with memories . . . each curtain a death."

Although she wanted to model her performance on someone, she couldn't find a similar type.

"I tried to look around," she said, "but someone like that wouldn't work in film or stage today. They'd be too much of a pain. In the old days the boards were full of people like this, who were known for their off-stage behavior.

"But we don't love the theater the way we did then. Once in a while people will go to a musical, but it's not a part of daily life."

In the movie, she pretends to like Cusack's play until he starts rewriting it, with considerable coaching from a talented gangster played by Chazz Palmenteri. Suddenly she finds Cusack's original "tepid and cerebral" and applauds the street smarts Palmenteri is introducing.

"I think she probably didn't like it from the start," Wiest said. "She was just grateful that something came along. She spends the whole movie manipulating him to make the part more glamourous. She did know it was a pretty lousy play."

Wiest has worked with Allen on several films, and she still finds his methods enigmatic: "He seldom discusses his intentions. He just wants to get it on film."

They first worked together 10 years ago on "The Purple Rose of Cairo," thanks to recommendations by Allen's casting director, Juliet Taylor, and Diane Keaton, who had seen her in a New York production of "The Three Sisters."

Wiest already had appeared in several movies, including a couple of Jill Clayburgh pictures, "It's My Turn" (she ended up on the cutting-room floor) and "I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can," although she regards 1983's "Independence Day" as her first big break. Her character, a passive, battered wife, was a supporting role, but it quickly became the heart of the movie.

"It was my first really meaningful film," she said. "I was just thrilled to have it. Even though it wasn't around for very long, it's one of the things I'm proudest of."

She went on to play motherly types in Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" and Jodie Foster's "Little Man Tate," while simultaneously becoming a single mother off-screen.

Now 46, she has adopted two children, Emily, 7, and Lily, 3. She's so devoted to the children she has turned down several roles, including parts in Allen's films, in order to be with them.

She made a comeback last year in Michael Ritchie's "Cops and Robbersons" and worked again for Ritchie in "The Scout," playing Brendan Fraser's psychiatrist. She has no plans, but she'd eventually like to follow up on a stage-directing career she was starting just before Emily arrived.

It won't be the first time she's changed directions. Trained as a child at the School of American Ballet in New York, she was a teenager when she decided she didn't want to spend five hours a day preparing to dance.

"In high school, the English teacher decided he'd put on `Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.' The next year I played Eliza in `Pygmalion.' I got hooked."