Text: PATRICK HEALYIt has been 23 years since the actress Diane Lane performed onstage , and the emotionally grueling rehearsals for her return - in the Goodman Theater's revival of Tennessee Williams' 1959 play "Sweet Bird of Youth"- had her a bit tired on a recent morning. She apologized twice for being sleepy but when the conversation turned to the monstrousness of her character, the Princess Kosmonopolis, a faded movie star hiding out incognito in a Gulf Coast hotel, Lane sprang to life .

The Princess, you see, is the sort of character - cruel, manipulative, desperate - that Lane dreamed of playing when she was a child actress in New York in the 1970s, when she was cast as offspring in Andrei Serban's off-off-Broadway productions of "Medea," "Electra" and other classics. She became absorbed watching actresses a few feet away play these self-destructive title characters, and for years she missed the roles as pretty young things in the 1980s movies "The Outsiders" and "The Cotton Club" and later as unhappy women in "Unfaithful" (for which she was nominated for an Academy Award) and "Nights in Rodanthe."

"I've thought for a long time now, I just want to play a bitch, and believe me, I'm capable of it," said Lane, now 47. "Must female characters always be appealing ? Must we always be - what's that word, I always block on it - sympathetic? That apple-pie-American thing: The likable ingenue? You're either playing Cinderella or else one of the jealous sisters or the evil stepmother . Oh, no, I can be all of those things. You can ask my husband - and my ex-husband."

Lane said she has also wanted to go back to theater, now that her daughter - with her first husband, actor Christopher Lambert - is in college. For the last couple of years Lane (who is married to actor Josh Brolin) had been working with theater director Michael Wilson to bring another Williams classic, "The Night of the Iguana," to Broadway but timing and casting have not aligned.

The director of that Broadway project was to be David Cromer. Cromer had been trying to get a "Sweet Bird" production off the ground for years, having become smitten in the sixth grade with the 1962 movie starring Geraldine Page and Paul Newman. After the Kidman-Franco pairing fell through, he turned to the Goodman Theatre.

Cromer recalled being given a list of actresses who might play the Princess here, and Lane's name instantly took hold of his imagination. Diane possesses all the verisimilitude of this character for the audience, said. "She's this exciting, gorgeous actress who became a glamorous star when she was young - Natalie Wood times 100 - and has had to find her way through a long career." His only concern - whether Lane would be tough enough to put aside vanity in playing the Princess - was forgotten when they met for a meal near her home in Los Angeles. "She wanted to strip everything onstage that might seem superficial," he said.

"Sweet Bird of Youth" is one of Williams' last major plays, written after he won the Pulitzer Prize for "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1948 and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in 1955, and it is certainly one of his most lurid. The first act is largely a duet in a hotel room between the hashish-smoking Princess (whose real name is Alexandra del Lago) and Chance, an aspiring actor who trades sexual favors in hopes that she will give him entrance to Hollywood. They have come to Chance's hometown so he can try to win back his childhood love, yet he faces the threat of castration from her father, a political boss who is one of several grotesquely characters in the drama.

Lane had little familiarity with "Sweet Bird" before Cromer called on her but said she had a flash of recognition after reading the play: The Princess was the sort of stage gorgon that she spent her childhood around.

She was 6 years old, a lively Manhattan kid, when her father, Burt, drove her to the East Village in his taxi for children's auditions. She insisted on going in alone and marched up to the top floor, where she announced to a roomful of longhaired artists, "I'm here for the job." The next few years were a kind of apprenticeship under Serban, performing in his productions of Greek classics and at summer theater festivals across Europe. She found a more stable family in the theater, she said, as her mother - a singer and Playboy centerfold - and her father had a tempestuous relationship.

"I felt kind of rescued by Ellen Stewart," Lane said of the legendary leader of La MaMa, "and I had all these surrogate parents in the acting company when we were abroad. They had to put aside their hedonistic-20-year-old-in-Amsterdam mentality and ask each other: Who's going to take care of the girl?".

At 12 Lane was in the ensemble of Serban's "Cherry Orchard" with Irene Worth, Raul Julia and Meryl Streep at Lincoln Center Theater, and months later Joseph Papp, the artistic director of the Public Theater, gave her a Cartier bracelet. Inscribed on it were two words: Someday Juliet.

But whatever innocence she had would soon end during a falling out with Papp and the Public when they wanted her to move with "Runaways" to Broadway, and she opted to do her first film, "A Little Romance," with Laurence Olivier in 1979. That movie landed her on the cover of Time magazine, which proclaimed her one of "Hollywood's Whiz Kids" and led Olivier to describe her as the next Grace Kelly. But it also ended her run of stage roles.

"The Mafia made me an offer I couldn't refuse," Lane said of the movie industry. "Until then I'd wanted to go on to study law and focus on the rehabilitation of our prison system. And my father used to say: 'Don't move to L.A. There are vampires there.' But I was a kid. What did I know?"

She returned to theater in 1989 to help Serban, who was looking for a last-minute replacement to play Olivia in "Twelfth Night" at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Lane said she had never read an entire Shakespeare play at that point, nor had she received any formal classical training.

Serban said that Lane's beauty was only the most obvious of her assets.

She has an unassuming quality and a powerful directness that helps create full-blooded, sensual characters," he said. "I feel she has done wonderful stuff in movies, but I think in theater she can do her best work. She is a stage animal, and I think in 'Sweet Bird' she will be fulfilling her potential."

Lane's reputation for bringing out smoldering sex appeal in lonely women does not mean that the Princess is natural for her. Both she and her co-star, Finn Wittrock, who plays Chance, said the sexual games between their characters had been the hardest moments to play so far, because the degradation gets so ugly. They said they were playing those moments matter-of-factly, not playing around the fact that the Princess is bartering with Chance's body. Lane said those moments reflected both Williams' insights about self-disgust and sex as a refuge.

Tennessee knew very well that human beings are sexual beings," she said. "I can pretty much relate to everything the Princess goes through , although it's a little tricky with the gigolo thing. Don't know that I've ever paid for it."

Whether Broadway will see Lane's Princess is an open question; there are no plans to transfer the production to New York after Chicago, though reviews might change that.

Lane stressed that she did not sign on to "Sweet Bird" with expectations about renewing her New York stage career nearly 35 years after Papp christened her with Cartier.

"I used to walk past the Juilliard School every day on the way to 'Cherry Orchard' and think I was a off-off-Broadway kid who would never be part of the elite theater world," she said. '`And in rehearsals with Cromer, I'm still learning, still thinking through how to play all of this self-disgust and mercilessness of Tennessee's character."