THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Downplaying Big-Shot Image : Mild Danny Aiello Bears Little Relation to Larger-Than-Life Roles

Although he describes himself as “a New York guy from the streets,” Danny Aiello has the usual trappings of a star doing interviews on the road--posh hotel suite, name recognition at the front desk, press agent to greet you in the lobby.

But once you’ve been escorted up the elevator to meet the great man, the mood shifts.

Aiello, famous for turning bit parts into larger-than-life character studies in about three dozen movies, prefers to dispense with celebrity rites. Eager not to be taken for a big shot, he avoids such time-honored customs as the grand entrance. He slips into your presence, as if by accident.

“I’m still a little whacked out,” he says, sinking onto a sofa after Sandy, his wife of 38 years, has welcomed you at the door. “I’m not much of a flier.”

Jet lag notwithstanding, the tall, barrel-chested Aiello hardly looks the worse for wear.

He is dressed in a black shirt, powder-blue jeans and tan loafers, no socks. Though his soft-spoken voice is unexpected, given his bearish size, the only concession to jet lag would seem to be the pair of granny-style sunglasses hiding his eyes.

As he recounts the reason for his weekend dash to the East Coast and back in time to continue a five-city tour with Tom Dulack’s comedy “Breaking Legs” (through Sunday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts), Aiello quickly becomes sentimental.

“My only daughter got married,” he says. “We had to send her off. She’s our youngest kid. She picked out this place for the wedding. It was sensational. A mansion on the Hudson River.

“I didn’t want to make a big thing out of my being there, but she wanted me to do something special. So I sang the song I always identify with my wife--’The Wind Beneath My Wings.’ You know it?”

Gently, he begins to sing. Aiello’s tenorish voice is not the most beautiful instrument, but it carries the tune. And he doesn’t quit until he has gone through all the lyrics.

“She was crying like hell,” he says. “I was crying like hell.”

When we finally get around to talking about his role as a farcical Mafioso in “Breaking Legs,” Aiello volunteers that he rejected it the first time it was offered to him three years ago for an Off-Broadway production.

“I turned it down because I was busy doing a movie and the script didn’t knock me out,” the Manhattan-born, Bronx-bred actor explains. “I said, ‘I did this before.’ But I didn’t know how good it was. I do the script on stage now and people go nuts over it. It’s very light. That’s the intention.”

Even so, Aiello says he only agreed to take the plum role on the rebound--”Breaking Legs” originated at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 1989, then ran in New York for 13 months--because producer Bud Yorkin plans to remake the play as a movie with him as its star.

“I said, ‘OK, I’ll do this under that one set of circumstances,’ ” recounts Aiello, who committed to the tour for 10 weeks. “I said, ‘I’ll utilize the time to investigate the character on the stage,’ which is something I’ve never done for a movie.”

A latecomer to acting, the 60-ish Aiello got started in the theater but is best known for his screen roles, among them pizza parlor owner Sal in “Do the Right Thing,” which earned him an Oscar nomination; Cher’s jilted fiance in “Moonstruck,” Mia Farrow’s brutish husband in “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, in “Ruby.”

Aiello, also an Emmy winner for best actor in a TV movie (“A Family of Strangers”), launched his acting career in his mid-30s while working as a bouncer in a New York comedy club, having lost his job as union president of a bus driver’s local. With no training at all, unless you count the times he was called upon to play straight man for the club’s comics, he discovered a talent for performing.

“What happened was a complete miracle. A guy named Louis La Russo had written some plays and asked me to do them. He’s a guy from Hoboken (N.J.). He came out of nowhere. We teamed up.

“We did three of his plays at this tiny little place called the Churchyard Playhouse, where you performed for 20, maybe 30 people. The steam pipes made all kinds of noise. Every one of the three plays we did there--’Knockout,’ ‘Wheelbarrow Closures’ and ‘Lamppost Reunion’--goes to Broadway. It had to be a miracle. There’s no other way to explain it.”

Aiello’s performance in “Lamppost Reunion” drew raves as well as a Theatre World Award for best Broadway newcomer. He also won acclaim in other stage roles, earning an Obie Award for his Off-Broadway performance starring in “Gemini,” which he reprised on Broadway.

More roles came his way, in Woody Allen’s “The Floating Light Bulb” and John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” bringing him still wider recognition. In 1988, he won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his portrait of Phil, a violent ex-con coke head, in David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” at the Westwood Playhouse.

“I really think ‘Hurlyburly’ is the reason I got the Oscar nomination for ‘Do the Right Thing,’ ” says Aiello, who has removed his sunglasses, “because it gave people a chance to compare me in opposite roles. I’m doing the play, then out comes the movie. They see me as this druggie on the stage, then they see me as this working man in the movie. That caught what I could do as an actor.”

Aiello remains focused on a film career. His most recent picture, “Me and the Kid,” is due for release later this month, and he has just finished working in Luc Besson’s “Leon.” He also wants to direct.

“I’ve become, well, not an expert, but I know about movies. I see things in total form. The whole shape. I don’t just see it from the actor’s point of view. I used to look through a script like this.” He leafs through an imaginary sheaf of papers. “Let’s see,” he says, running his finger down the invisible pages. “Me . . . me . . . me . . . me . . . That’s how I used to do it. Now I look for the overall scheme. I’m interested in the relationships between the characters, not just my own stuff.”

He says he still intends to keep working on the stage, though, and one day would like to give Willie Loman a try in “Death of a Salesman.”

“Can you imagine a 6-foot-3 Willie? That would be rare. I’m sure I could do it.

“Harold Clurman (the drama critic) used to say I was one of those American actors who could easily transfer over to Shakespeare without a problem because I make the lowliest characters seem grand.

“All I would have to do is polish up my language.”

* “Breaking Legs” continues through Sunday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. (310) 916-8500.