A BEAUTIFUL 'EVENING' CLAIRE DANES HAS SHARED A SOUNDSTAGE WITH PLENTY OF HUGE STARS, BUT THIS TIME SHE HAS TOP BILLING.

Byline: Evan Henerson

Staff Writer

Leave it to Claire Danes to find the starriest female lineup in film.

Yet again.

You can practically trace the heavy estrogen line from "How To Make an American Quilt" to "Little Women," all the way up to the film she's currently stumping: "Evening."

"It's been in my consciousness for a while, and it germinated and finally became manifest with this unimaginably talented cast," gushes the 28-year-old actress about "Evening" which opens Friday.

She's had occasion to be this cast-besotted before.

The "Shopgirl" star, it may be remembered, was also part of Stephen Daldry's ensemble drama "The Hours" in 2002, playing the daughter of Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughn. But between Nicole Kidman's Oscar-winning Virginia Woolf (with celebrated schnoz) and Julianne Moore's Oscar-nominated desperate housewife, Streep et al., Danes' Julia Vaughn barely merited a mention.

Five years later, "The Hours" has given way to "Evening," and circumstances have changed. Several of Danes' "Hours" mates have re-upped for "Evening," and this time Danes is the leading lady while Glenn Close, Natasha Richardson, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave and even Streep are doing supporting duty.

Eastern thought

Collette, Streep, Eileen Atkins and screenwriter Michael Cunningham were all part of the "Hours" team. Danes and Cunningham are even taking the same life-drawing class in New York where the actress lives. "We all kind of live in the same neighborhood," says Danes.

In "Evening," based on the Susan Minot novel, Danes plays Ann Grant, a young singer who attends her best friend's wedding and falls in love with the same handsome doctor (played by Patrick Wilson) who is secretly beloved by the bride (Mamie Gummer, Streep's daughter). Some 50 years later, the cancer-stricken Ann (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) confesses a secret born of that fateful wedding to her adult daughters (Richardson and Collette).

Danes gets no screen time with Redgrave or Streep, but she isn't griping. "That's OK," she says. "It's enough sharing the same movie, never mind the same character (with Redgrave). I don't need to get greedy."

Besides, Danes says, she just plain likes her character -- a determined artist not above potentially disrupting a marriage or causing a public stir among the upper crust.

"It's not so often I get to play someone who is so dynamic and wrestling with such meaningful big feelings," says Danes. "We're not supposed to judge our characters, but we all do. I certainly do, and I liked her. I admired her."

Living with the script

Early in her career, Danes had a flair for selecting roles that paralleled what was going on in her life: from the hell of teendom in her short-lived TV series, "My So-Called Life" to the first flush of passionate love in Baz Luhrmann's take on Shakespeare in "Romeo + Juliet."

Ann Grant is at something of a crossroads in "Evening," but Danes -- who has been romantically linked to actor Billy Crudup since they starred together in 2004's "Stage Beauty" -- sees no direct biographical parallels this time around.

"My job was to fall in love, basically," the 28-year-

old actress says, "which is something I've played before."

Indeed she has, with a man more than twice her age ("Shopgirl"), with a gender-confused, cross-dressing actor ("Stage Beauty"), even with the man in charge of saving the planet ("Terminator 3").

How to kiss

There are of course challenges to convincingly bringing off romance: "making sure you don't give too much tongue," says Danes, presumably keeping hers somewhat in cheek. "I don't know. Sometimes it's challenging playing a heightened emotion of any kind. You have that almost manic feeling of falling in love. To maintain that energy is a little exhausting."

Director Lajos Koltai had worked briefly with Danes during her teen years when he served as the cinematographer on the Jodie Foster-directed film "Home for the Holidays." That 1995 film, however, was hardly a point of reference.

"She said, 'Don't even talk about that movie. I don't even remember it,' " Koltai says. "Now she's playing much more straight characters, mostly complicated ones. I wanted to see if she could play a character who was not open yet."

And Wilson, who met Danes in London over karaoke (he was shooting "Phantom of the Opera" at the time, while she was on "Stage Beauty") calls his co-star "one of those people who just want to makes everything better and doesn't settle for anything."

Later this summer, Danes appears with Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer in the fantasy epic "Stardust."

"I play a celestial being who crashes to Earth and gets kidnapped by a young naive guy," Danes says. "Initially she's very resentful, and she becomes less (so)."

Evan Henerson, [phone]

[e-mail]

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

no caption (Claire Danes)