FILM; Ellen Barkin: Is She Difficult Or Just Straight Outta Queens?

Ellen Barkin bites into a strawberry and takes a sip of decaf. Slowly, her face crinkles up into her signature lopsided squint-grin. "Just look at this body," she says, at once amused and exasperated. She is pointing to herself.

Esthetically speaking, it is a pleasing body, as those who have seen her sexual duels in "The Big Easy," "Sea of Love" or "Switch" will vividly recall. And from the perspective of a visitor roughly her age (still under 40 and, says Ms. Barkin, we'll just leave it at that), it is downright enviable: slender and full and taut in all the right places. So?

"I just had a baby three months ago. Would I look like this if I wasn't an actress? I mean, come on!"

If one wonders why Ellen Barkin, a perennial critic's darling, hasn't yet clambered onto the A list of Hollywood actresses that includes Barbra, Michelle, Julia and Geena, the answer is apparent by meeting's end: the woman has a bit of an attitude problem.

True, she puts in the gym time to stay in competitive shape. She pops up in Liz Smith's column and People magazine just enough to meet her minimum celebrity-party requirement. She has co-starred with a few good men: Dennis Quaid, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and now Robert De Niro, in "This Boy's Life," which opens on Friday. And she's certainly publicity-savvy. At tantalizing moments during an interview she insists that a tape recorder be stopped. Then she'll dish memorably, all off the record.

So?

Well, there is that insinuatingly vague, kiss-of-death label: difficult. Blake Edwards, who directed her in "Switch" and is fond of her, nonetheless says: "She can be somewhat of an emotional bully. She's very suspicious of people. She's a street fighter, very complex, very sexy. And there's also a frightened little girl in there; that's where the mistrust comes from. You know that line, 'She's an interesting cat, but don't put your hand in the cage'?"

Michael Caton-Jones, the director of "This Boy's Life," takes Ms. Barkin's contentiousness in stride. "One man's difficulty is another man's conversation," he says, and then sighs. "She is very intelligent and would question me a lot. Ellen is feisty. But that never bothers me: it means an actor really cares."

Ms. Barkin does concede that she's a practiced scrapper: as a teen-ager from Queens in the 60's she ran with a tough girl gang and, in the 70's, she was a snarlish downtown waitress par excellence ("I trained at the Mickey Ruskin School of Surly Waitressing"), so she has no problem getting in the face of a screenwriter, a director or a producer. But, she retorts, "having an opinion and sticking to your guns -- if you're a man, like Nick Nolte, Al Pacino or Robert De Niro -- means 'deeply talented and deeply committed.' If you're a woman, it means 'You're difficult.' "

Other A-list disqualifiers: she's not a workaholic -- just about one big picture a year -- she lives on the wrong coast and does summers and Christmas in . . . Ireland (with her husband, the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne).

She also makes strange, anti-leading-lady career choices. She turned down a role in a subsequently much-debated film because she hated its sexual politics. (She declines to specify which movie.) Boldly leaped instead for "Switch," in which she played a male lustivore who is reincarnated as a woman: a farce that, despite some hilarious moments, got disappointing reviews.

And then Ms. Barkin shows up in small, independent movies and takes bite-size roles. She appears in her friend John Turturro's current movie, "Mac," playing a self-absorbed artist's model. In "This Boy's Life," in which she portrays a vivacious woman who leaves one violent relationship only to get trapped in another that's far more ominous, the part is a supporting one, behind Mr. De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays her teen-age son. In the lyrical "Into the West," directed by Mike Newell and opening in August, she plays fifth banana in a role smaller than that of her husband (the film's associate producer), two young boys and a large white horse.

OVER A LANGUOROUS Sunday brunch last month in a borrowed East Village apartment, she nibbled at food and picked at Hollywood, talked about sexuality, marriage and motherhood. A visit with Ellen Barkin is not like a visit with a typical movieland diva: no sign of pampered, baroque behavior. Her blond hair bobbed, her voice husky, she is wearing tight black leather pants, black work boots, a shapeless gray sweater, and saucy gold hoop earrings and bangle bracelets. Less a personality than, well, a person, she checks in with the baby sitter for her two children and rinses out the coffee filter. Blunt and often quite funny, she likes to turn the tables ("Well, what do you think?" she'll say) and seems to relish questions that make her work hard.

Since her tour-de-force performance in the 1989 thriller "Sea of Love," her name has come to be associated with powerfully sexual roles ("a professional sex bomb," deplored Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic), which Ms. Barkin finds ironic and even a small victory. "Until 'Desert Bloom' " -- the 1986 film in which she plays a lush 50's sexpot -- "no one would ever let me play a part like that. My acting teachers said audiences wouldn't buy it coming from me.