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SHE may play a priggish nun - but get Eileen Atkins out of her habit, and she's one great dame.
The woman The Post's Clive Barnes calls "one of the English-speaking theater's greatest actresses" - Dame Eileen, to the Brits - is now starring in the Tony-winning "Doubt," 40 years after making her Broadway debut.
And while the dour Sister Aloysius is all don'ts and dogmas, the woman who plays her couldn't be more different: funny, candid and merrily profane.
No wonder Colin Farrell swooned.
As Atkins revealed in May, "a simply stunningly gorgeous big film star aged 28 years old came into my hotel room for sex without strings" - causing Atkins, then age 70, to spend the next 21/2 hours saying no.
Though she refused to name him, a brisk bout of Googling unearthed none other than the lusty leprechaun himself.
Their near-tryst made headlines in Britain 10 days running ("Colin, get off the Atkins Diet!" cried one), and while she now says that neither Farrell nor her stalwart husband seemed to mind, "I shouldn't have shown off about it - I should have shut up."
Happily, she won't.
"He's a wonderful actor and
an enchanting young man,"
she tells The Post, looking kittenish in short boots and
a chenille sweater.
"He's not just sexy, he's funny. Anyway, I wasn't going to get all pooh-faced and say, 'Out! How dare you!' Because I thought to myself, Wow! Are you lucky!
"But I couldn't go through with it," she confesses.
"My husband actually said to me, 'I think I would have had to forgive you if you had.' He'd have hoped I kept it quiet, in that case."
And she may well have, though the hyperarticulate Atkins rarely holds back anything. She was the one who, during the filming of "The Hours," insisted that something be done to Nicole Kidman's pert little schnoz:
"She was perfect [for the part], but you canh't play Virginia Woolf with a nose like that - you just cahn't!" says Atkins, who's toured the world playing Woolf in an acclaimed one-woman show, "A Room of One's Own."
She's never shied from looking bad for a part - insisting on nose hairs and a bald wig for her role in "Vanity Fair."
Vanity, thy name isn't Atkins - who considers plastic surgery a scourge of the times.
"I did a movie last year with Isabella Rossellini, who's probably one of the most beautiful women in the world, and she said, 'I'm beginning to feel I can't go back to America - people are getting at me so much about having a face job! They're making it sound like I'm walking around with short sleeves and not shaving under my arms, like it's not proper grooming not to have your face done.' And I was so horrified at that!"
About 15 years ago, Atkins says, she made the rounds of casting directors in L.A.
"I said, 'Look at this face - I'm going to have nothing done with it. Soon, you're not going to find a single actress in America who will look like a period grandmother. . . . When you need an old lady, you're going to have to have me."
It seems to have paid off, with 18 films in the last six years, including the as-yet unreleased "Ask the Dust," with Farrell.
"Wait till you see it - I'm a hideous old landlady," she says, happily.
Apparently, Farrell didn't mind at all.
barbara.hoffman@nypost.com
Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
