ABC SHOWS AN ANNE FRANK WE MIGHT NOT REMEMBER.

Byline: Staff Writer

The confessional, brooding and often hopeful scribblings of a certain teen-age girl in wartime Holland have become the world's most widely read nonfiction book after the Bible.

But there is more to learn about Anne Frank than what her diary holds, as Austrian journalist Melissa Muller's 1998 biography revealed, and that is the heart of the ABC miniseries ``Anne Frank,'' premiering at 9 tonight.

``Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,'' published in 1947, covers only a brief time in Anne's life, has its facts skewed by its unreliable narrator - a girl with raging hormones who is denied social interaction - and ends abruptly before her family's capture by Gestapo officers.

The miniseries ``Anne Frank'' tells more of the vivacious German Jewish girl's life in Amsterdam, before she was forced to wear a large Star of David patch in public, before she learned that some people hated her just because of her lineage, before she went into hiding fearing for her life. And it continues beyond the desperate, hopeless days when she and her sister, Margot, succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

``Anne Frank'' is the third Holocaust-related project for Oscar-winning actor Ben Kingsley, who plays Otto Frank, her father. He previously played the title Nazi hunter in the TV film ``Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story'' and Oskar Schindler's accountant in ``Schindler's List.''

He said he did not need to do the same type of research for ``Anne Frank'' as he had with the others, but that did not make the burden any lighter.

``The responsibility does not diminish by one iota, the responsibility to our audience to tell the story as accurately and as fully and as compassionately as possible,'' Kingsley said. ``And it's almost impossible ... because it's incomprehensible, will never be understood, must never be forgotten, cannot be forgiven, and it happened, and we are still totally, totally baffled by it.''

That duty to accuracy included screenwriter Kirk Ellis doing additional research beyond Muller's extensive explorations. In a Prague warehouse, production designer Ondrej Melvaso painstakingly re-created the now-enshrined warehouse annex where the Franks, the van Pelses and Fritz Pfeffer hid for 22 months, as well as the canal-front street outside it. And the crew built its own concentration camp because the actual camps now are too museumlike.

For director Robert Dornhelm, brought in by ABC just six weeks before filming, casting Anne was a major concern. Her face is familiar from photographs, and much has been written about her personality: outgoing, moody, impetuous, devoted to her father. He needed an actress to play the full range of her last six years, from happy-go-lucky preteen to author in exile to 15-year-old sickly victim.

``I said, 'There's no way I can do this movie unless I have the perfect Anne Frank,' '' Dornhelm recalled. ``You cannot do this film and have somebody that's just OK for that role.''

The producers had started the casting process months earlier, collecting more than a thousand tapes from the Netherlands, Berlin, Munich, London, New York and Los Angeles. Dornhelm said he felt overwhelmed by the task, then relieved when he watched the video of 14-year-old English actress Hannah Taylor Gordon, known for smaller parts in ``Jakob the Liar'' and ``Mansfield Park.''

``She really is kind of phenomenal, a very talented girl,'' Dornhelm said, watching his star in a Burbank editing room while the sound was being finessed on one of her scenes.

Kingsley said Hannah was a true professional, able to get into the most difficult emotional moments during filming and then bounce out of them during breaks, as did the rest of the cast.

``Because Robert comes from a documentary heritage, we found ourselves in certain scenes in such a storm of reality that no research in the world could have prepared us for,'' Kingsley said. ``The reality of the scenes threw our bodies into shock and threw our voices into the voices of people in shock. All we had to do was just cling to the fact that we'd learned our lines and say them at the right time, because those German shepherd dogs and those SS uniforms and those 'kapos' in their striped suits and truncheons, and the blinding snow that happened to fall on every single take, was something that I will never, never, never forget.''

ABC is rating Sunday's opening episode PG, and the conclusion at 9 p.m. Monday TV-14, both for violence. The last hour, which begins with the family's train ride to Auschwitz, will be shown without commercials. Dornhelm said he was pleased with that decision by ABC, but he would have been surprised if any advertisers really wanted their commercials shown in such a grave programming environment.

His cast - including Lili Taylor as the Franks' protector, Miep Gies; Brenda Blethyn as the fussy, feisty Auguste van Pels, and German TV star Tatjana Blacher as Edith Frank - showed extreme dedication to the project. Blethyn and Blacher, who had upcoming film commitments, decided to have their hair chopped off in the Auschwitz scenes rather than using wigs as their contracts permitted.

``I could not believe the generosity (of that gesture),'' Dornhelm said. ``Because for the next two or three years it's got to grow. I didn't dare to ask because I know what it means for an actress the next three years having to work in wigs.''

The serious subject took its toll during filming. ``There was quite a bit of depression going around,'' the director recalled. He said some actors surprised him by showing up on the set on their days off, even at the cold, muddy concentration camp location.

``They told me afterwards that those were the days that they were extremely down and depressed and realized what we were portraying here, and they were very lonely,'' he said.

Dornhelm said he was too busy during filming to experience those feelings, but he understands them. For personal reasons he has avoided for years making films about the Holocaust.

``Half my family died in concentration camps,'' said the 52-year-old director, who was born in Romania, raised in Vienna and now lives in Malibu. He first dealt with it by making the 2000 documentary ``The Concert,'' in which Simon Rattle conducted a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the Mauthausen concentration camp.

``You know, I just never felt comfortable having to do show business in there, as much as I felt the need, especially these days, to remind people and kind of raise the issues.''

Dornhelm said he was compelled to accept the ``Anne Frank'' assignment because of the growing neo-Nazi movement in Europe as well as skeptics who again are questioning whether the Holocaust happened or was as bad as historians and survivors describe.

Anne Frank and her family certainly were not the only Jews who hid from Nazis in hopes of surviving the war. Muller estimates that as many as 30,000 went underground in Holland alone. But Kingsley says Anne has become the archetype for many Holocaust victims. ``She was a member of a great tribe, always threatened, always under siege, and always surviving and learning and teaching,'' he said.

Kingsley said he carried a photograph of Anne with him during the filming of ``Schindler.''

``I used to talk to it. I used to say, 'This is for you.' '' But he said he didn't feel the need to carry it on this film. ``I had her holding my hand, you know, calling me Daddy,'' he said softly.

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Photo: Hannah Taylor Gordon portrays Holocaust victim and author Anne Frank, in all her moods, in a four-hour miniseries starting tonight on ABC.