Ruehl To Leave `Frasier' To Work On Her Own Series

NEW YORK - First, the bad news: Mercedes Ruehl has, for the moment, filmed her last guest shot on "Frasier," alas.

"It might be fun to go back and do one or two at some point, because I enjoyed it so much," said Ruehl.

It was her first venture in series TV and presented an acting challenge to the actress who won both a Tony for Broadway's "Lost in Yonkers" and an Oscar for "The Fisher King" in 1991.

"When you do film, you aim your performance at a lens," she explained. "In theater, you aim your performance at a roomful of people, but in television, you've got a lens and a bank of people behind it.

"You just don't know where to aim it - and it really is a thing that has to be aimed."

Her aim was true. As Kate Costas, boss of Seattle radio psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane, Ruehl's character Kate was very intelligent, cultured, talented, aggressive, blunt, irritating, undemonstrative and attractive.

Kate was, in other words, pure candy to the neurotic, conflicted Frasier.

"When I first spoke to the writers, I asked, `Could we do something that's a little Tracy-and-Hepburn, a little Beatrice-and-Benedick?' (characters from Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing.") They said, `Yeah, yeah, yeah.'

"Of course, they've been writing for their five characters for three years," she said, "and when they bring on a new character, it's terra incognito for them, and for me, too."

"So they're being really careful, and I'm trying to figure out what they want. It's like an uneasy dance at first," she says, her long, expressive hands sculpting the conversational space before her.

Kate and Frasier's fire-and-ice relationship reaches a decisive moment in an episode that airs in January. Stay tuned.

Now for the good news: She's developing her own comedy for NBC next year.

"Boy, there's a crash course in L.A.!" said the actress, a devoted New York City resident, who was fresh from a week of "taking meetings" with Hollywood production houses. She said the producers were very receptive.

"I was telling them I want to do it in New York," she said. "There are a lot of actors who don't want to get too far from the theater, from being in a live room, with a live audience for a one-time only experience."

Ruehl is an artist, but she's no fool. She reeled off an A-list of "New York actors" who, like her, have avoided the L.A. lifestyle.

"They all have children in these expensive New York schools," she said. "They love to do theater and they occasionally do film, but like me, they need a sinecure."

Her creative team includes Richard LeGravenese, screenwriter for "The Fisher King," and former "Cosby Show" producer John Marcus. Their working concept involves an Eastern prep school for misfits and incorrigibles.

In the development stage, everything can change, but Ruehl is adamant on one point: She won't make the series in L.A. "for practical reasons."

"For one thing, I don't trust what's fulminating under the earth," she said. "And, for another, Los Angeles is a one industry town. The people who pump your gas, serve you breakfast, take your messages at hotels - everybody is aspiring to get into this business."

"It's maybe not the healthiest atmosphere for an artist to live in," she said. "Multiplicity and variety are a much more healthy atmosphere if you're going to do creative work."

"I think L.A. is a little like a Third World city, where there's extreme poverty and extreme wealth and they never mix," she said. "Here, we knock up against each other all the time. We live on the same block."