Ellen Barkin is talking about the conversations she periodically has with her best friends - a group of actresses, who, like herself, have attained a certain stature in the business.
"We talk all the time, and the rarest phone call of all is, `Did you read so-and-so? It's really great!' That never happens. The phone call is usually, `You read so-and-so? Do you think you could do it? I couldn't do it.' "Barkin, who has made more than 20 films since she starred as Beth, the young abandoned wife in Barry Levinson's 1982 Baltimore buddy picture, "Diner," is ruing the sorry state of women's roles in this, the officially designated (by the Academy Awards folks) "Year of the Woman."
But Barkin also has something to cheer about: "This Boy's Life," in which she stars as a plucky single mom who tries desperately to make things work for her troubled teenage son. Her character - based on Rosemary Wolff, mother of Tobias Wolff, author of the memoir from which the film was adapted - is the sort of part actresses kill for: feisty, independent, complex.
"It was one of those really rare opportunities where, after I read it, I really wanted the job," Barkin recalls. "Normally, you read something, and you think, `Well, eh.' It's rare that I would actually feel like pursuing something."
And the part of Caroline in the film, which opened nationally Friday, was being pursued. Although Robert De Niro had already signed on to play Dwight Hansen, a Washington state redneck who approaches his new spousal and paternal responsibilities with patho-logical zeal, the female lead was not yet cast.
"There were so many actresses interested in that role," says Michael Caton-Jones, the Scottish director who helmed the late-'50s coming-of-age story, with newcomer Leonardo DiCaprio in the central role.
"I had a lot of attention from actresses for that part, but I chose Ellen because I'd never seen her do this kind of thing before," he said. "She's always been known as a kind of blond ball-buster. But when I met her she was a mom, she had a kid and all that - I could see a different side to her.
"And I felt that what I definitely, definitely didn't want to have happen to the character was that she be played as a victim. I felt that that would have been quite wrong. I felt that she should be a naturally lively and boisterous character who is victimized, but then comes back to a normal state of affairs. And Ellen fitted that bill quite well."
Barkin, who is sitting in a Park Avenue hotel room early on a Sunday morning, attempting to clear her froggy voice with frequent drinks of mineral water, agrees that motherhood made a difference in her approach to the part. Barkin and her husband, Irish actor Gabriel Byrne (they met on the set of 1987's arty reverie, "Siesta"), have a 3-year-old son, Jack, and a daughter, Romy, born in November.
"What happens is, when we go to approach a role - I assume with most actors this is pretty standard stuff - you don't have to work on what you already have. You know, the areas of commonality. You don't have to deal with those.
"What you have to deal with are the differences. And because I'm a mother, I didn't have to spend a whole lot of time figuring out what kind of feelings I would have when my son left me.
"Certainly when I read the book and the script and met Rosemary and Tobias Wolff, there's this kind of relationship that the mother and son have that seems so wonderful and playful. She, to me, represented the mother everybody wanted to have from the outside. The mom-as-friend who did crazy things, and I loved that about her.
"And I thought, of course, it would be great if I'm that way with my child when he's a teenager."
If the "areas of commonality" serve as the actor's entree into a character's psyche, the areas of un-commonality allow insights into the performer's own psychology.
"I think there were profound differences between the character and myself," notes the 39-year-old actress. "She's an eternal optimist, someone who looks on the bright side, which is ultimately her undoing for a while. She refuses to see the bad in anything. . . . She's an innocent, a total innocent, which I'm not. She's naive, incredibly trusting. There's not a shred of cynicism in this woman, even after this life she's been through."
Barkin, on the other hand, oozes a certain honed cynicism that defines the native New Yorker. Born in the Bronx, this graduate of the High School of Performing Arts and Hunter College has a face - tough and wary, with a lopsided smile and squinty eyes - that demands honesty. And delivers it.
Speaking about "Into the West," the Irish boys-and-their-horse fantasy in which she and Byrne star, Barkin is characteristically blunt about how she ended up playing a gypsy with a prickly Celtic burr.
"We went to Ireland just to be with Gabriel," she says. "I took the family. And there was this role, which was originally a man. Then I guess the various European financiers felt you had to have a girl in this movie, so there was a lot of discussion about who should play it.
"They wanted somebody well-known. But to be honest - this doesn't sound great - the part wasn't good enough for anybody they wanted to take it. It's one of those parts that's just stuck in there. I think it was never fully formed by Jim Sheridan, the writer: He had it in his head, but it certainly wasn't there on the page. And they were all just sitting around one day, and everybody looked at me, and said, `Well, you are here, and you certainly would help us with our financing.'
"And I was very pleased to do it, because it was a script I always loved, so I wasn't looking for any great role or anything. There were great things in it for me: I got to ride a horse bare-back across Ireland for four weeks."
Barkin, who has her blond hair cut in a neo-'60s shag, is likewise straightforward when it comes to discussing the movie that elevated her to sex symbol: 1989's Al Pacino thriller, "Sea of Love."
"I have an odd relationship to that movie," she explains. "Politically, I find it a little tough to take. . . . And I think, I know, that if it had not been Al Pacino, with all due respect, I would not have made it.
"Look what that movie has spawned. That movie is the mother of `Basic Instinct.' I can say that `Sea of Love' is the child of `Fatal Attraction,' too - it's that whole murderess theme. And I think, in a way, `Sea of Love' is almost a cheaper shot (than `Fatal Attraction') because it played her as the murderer through the whole movie, and then they say she's not!"
Barkin was one of a good many actresses who declined the part of an icepick-wielding, panty-less femme fatale in "Basic Instinct."
"It was a script that was sent to a certain number of actresses. I don't know if people were actually made financial offers, but I do know that people passed on it, myself included.
"I don't criticize Sharon Stone for taking that part. She needed to take that part, and I needed to take `Sea of Love.' She was not in a position to not take it, and I think she's a talented actress who'd been around for a while and who couldn't get a break, and now she's a star. The person who didn't need to be in that movie was Michael Douglas."
Barkin has been serious about movies since she was a child, growing up with an older brother in a middle-class Jewish family in Queens, where her parents moved when she was 6.
"I had this rich fantasy life that was about acting," she smiles. "I would get into bed at night and play out this scene from `Camille' - the Garbo death scene - when I was, like, 8. It was like intense melodrama, and I would tell Robert Taylor to go away, so he wouldn't see me die.
"And then when I saw Faye Dunaway in `Bonnie and Clyde,' which I saw 11 times in two weeks. I fell madly in love with her and thought that this was just the most fabulous thing I had ever seen."
Though Barkin enrolled in the High School of Performing Arts ("it was much groovier to be in the city than in Queens"), she didn't start acting seriously until she was "relatively old for the profession." She went on her first audition when she was 25, and, between waitressing jobs, performed Off-Broadway and in the occasional TV job. In the late '70s, Barkin landed a recurring role on the soap "Search for Tomorrow."
Since then she has distinguished herself in a number of strong - and not so strong - films: "Tender Mercies," "Down by Law," "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai," "The Big Easy," "Desert Bloom" (which, the actress points out, is not dissimilar to "This Boy's Life": "the '50s; drinking stepfather terrorizes young girl instead of young boy"). And she has worked opposite the leading men of the day: De Niro, Pacino, Nicholson, Rourke (as in Mickey, who qualifies as a leading man only in France).
Even so, and again somewhat ruefully, Barkin offers a confession - a comdemnation, really - of Hollywood, for consistently undervaluing women's roles.
"I realized when I first saw `This Boy's Life' finished, that I probably hadn't felt that way coming out of a movie I was in since `Tender Mercies.'
"That's kind of pathetic, isn't it? To think that was 10 years ago and I've been working steadily since then. But it's true."