Aristocrat? Maybe, but blue isn’t her only blood type

In a notable “Sex and the City” episode, actress Frances Sternhagen, 72, portraying upper-crust matriarch Bunny MacDougal, drops by with a basket of fresh muffins for her pampered son, Trey (Kyle MacLachlan), and his demure wife, Charlotte (series regular Kristin Davis).

Bunny finds the pair not quite ready for breakfast -- instead, very enthusiastically in the middle of the sex act. Shocked nearly out of her perky hair ribbon and three strands of pearls, Bunny stammers and flees from the room, never to make another uninvited entrance into the apartment -- ousted in TV’s first “sexorcism.” The performance netted Sternhagen an Emmy nomination for the 2001-02 TV season.

“She has a sort of East Side mental breakdown when she finds them,” says an appreciative Michael Patrick King, executive producer of the racy HBO comedy series. “It’s my favorite scene. It’s the same episode where she sneaks into Trey’s bedroom at night when he has a cold and rubs Vicks VapoRub on his chest, then Charlotte wakes up and they are both rubbing VapoRub on this guy’s chest. It’s about territorialism, the son being the territory. It is both sick and erotic, and Franny was up for it.”

When asked about her recurring role on “Sex and the City,” Sternhagen -- a member of the ensemble cast of “Morning’s at Seven,” which opens Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre -- offers a characteristic facial gesture, a quick smile accompanied by a deliberate scrunching of her sparkling blue eyes and a girlish wrinkle of her patrician nose. On Bunny, the expression seems oddly threatening; on Sternhagen, it’s a good-natured tease.

“I must say it’s fun to play these snobby older ladies. It’s always more fun to be obnoxious,” says Sternhagen, who portrayed a similarly frosty blueblood, Millicent Carter, on “ER.” “I have known women like that, and I can imitate them, I guess.”

Of the sexual frankness of the HBO series, she offers, with the trademark scrunch-and-wrinkle: “It’s certainly ... different. But it would never last if it wasn’t cleverly written. It’s believable and funny, and it’s very well played.”

Producer King describes Sternhagen -- Franny -- as the well-adjusted opposite of the deliciously dysfunctional Bunny or, for that matter, another of her well-known TV personae, Esther Clavin, the even more bizarrely domineering mother of John Ratzenberger’s Cliff Clavin on “Cheers.”

So does Daniel Sullivan, Sternhagen’s director in “Morning’s at Seven,” the Lincoln Center production of Paul Osborn’s 1938 play. The cast also includes Paul Dooley, Elizabeth Franz, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Piper Laurie, William Biff McGuire, Stephen Tobolowsky and Mary Louise Wilson.

“She has backbone; it’s not as though she is just docilely going ahead and doing anything you want her to do,” Sullivan says. “Franny is very definite, a true pro, but her sort of sweet nature certainly is true in her working relationships.” The Broadway production was nominated for nine Tonys, including three for featured actress for Sternhagen, Franz and Estelle Parsons, who portrayed three of four elderly sisters in the play (Parsons’ role will be played by Wilson in Los Angeles). Laurie was not nominated, leading the others to humbly propose that the Tonys create a category called an “ensemble award” instead of singling out anyone within the group. The issue became moot when the award went to Katie Finneran for “Noises Off.”

Despite a reputation for being grounded enough to offer to forgo a Tony, Sternhagen once again finds herself in the realm of neurotic family relationships in “Morning’s at Seven.”

Sternhagen -- herself the mother of six, including four actors -- plays mom to yet another aging momma’s boy in “Morning’s”-- this time in the role of the dimwitted Ida, a small-town Midwesterner watching with bemusement as her 40-year-old son, Homer (Tobolowsky), struggles to break family ties that might better be described as handcuffs in order to finally marry his sweetheart, Myrtle, 39 (Hagerty). They’ve been engaged for seven years.

In an interview during rehearsals for the Ahmanson production, Sternhagen points out that in her long career she has played many roles that fall well below the upper crust. That list includes a recent role as the mother of a policewoman in “The Laramie Project” for HBO, an adaptation of Moises Kaufman’s off-Broadway play about the hate-crime murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo.

But the Vassar College graduate acknowledges that somehow it’s the patrician image that sticks in people’s minds. The homespun Ida character, she says, gives her the opportunity to play against type. Sternhagen cites a poem about the four sisters, quoted in the play: “ ‘Esty’s smartest / Arry’s wildest / Ida’s slowest / Cora’s mildest.’ That’s a pretty good clue.”

“When we began casting, we sort of started with Franny and basically asked her which role she wanted to play, and she chose Ida,” director Sullivan says. “I think probably Ida was a role that was a bit of a stretch for Franny. Ida is the dimmest of the bunch, in terms of intellectual capacity, and Franny’s so smart and sharp, I think she thought it would be fun.”

Today, Sternhagen observes, most of the characters in “Morning’s” would be rushed to the nearest psychiatrist, but in this pre-WWII era, “the psychology is not spelled out, it just is,” she says. “The problems are not something to go to a therapist about, they just live with them.”

Although she is a veteran of the theater, with Tonys for “The Heiress” and “The Good Doctor,” Sternhagen admits she’s most likely to be recognized from her TV roles -- sort of. The actress says the exposure causes people to approach her thinking that they know her from somewhere, they just can’t remember where. They’re as likely to think she’s a local librarian or a salesclerk at the dry cleaner’s as a star of film, TV and stage.

Whether Sternhagen confesses to being an actress “depends on how I am asked, how politely and sincerely,” she says. “If they are polite, I’ll say, well, I’ve done some acting, maybe that’s how you know me.

“And if they are kind of a little rude,” she adds primly, with an emphatic scrunch-and-wrinkle, “I’ll just say, no, I don’t think you know me.”

*

‘Morning’s at Seven’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m., plus select other times.

Ends: Jan. 26

Price: $20 to $60

Contact: (213) 628-2772