PICASSO'S BLUE PERIOD : NEW FILM STUDIES THE GREAT PAINTER'S LIBIDINOUS APPETITES THROUGH THE EYES OF THE ONE LOVER WHO EMERGED WHOLE.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Film Writer

Not for nothing did Pablo Picasso devote years to painting women with shattered emotions - a subject many Los Angeles residents will remember from the exhibit ``Picasso and the Weeping Women,'' presented in 1994 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A genius of 20th-century painting, Picasso was also one of the century's most notorious manipulators of women, and his casual disregard for his lovers during his long life became as much a part of his reputation as his achievements on canvas.

The heroine of the new movie ``Surviving Picasso'' - which tells the story of the artist and the women who loved him - is Francoise Gilot, an aspiring painter who became involved with Picasso in 1943 when he was in his mid-60s and she was 40 years younger.

Gilot was never a subject of the ``Weeping Women'' paintings, although she is shown crying at least once in the movie - while she waits for Picasso to come home from a night of carousing with someone else. Instead, she was the one woman who managed to avoid being destroyed by him, and according to biographers, she was the only one ever to leave him rather than being left by him - which she did after 10 years, with two children, Claude and Paloma, in tow.

When filmmakers Ismael Merchant and James Ivory set out to tell the story of Picasso's complicated and selfish personal life, they knew exactly who they wanted to portray the Spanish painter, and they got him - Academy Award winner Anthony Hopkins.

Well-known for playing men of genius and charisma - from the writer C.S. Lewis in ``Shadowlands'' to the disgraced American president in ``Nixon'' to the fictional psychopath Hannibal Lecter in ``Silence of the Lambs'' - Hopkins, 57, was also a close physical match for Picasso.

``Physically, he was absolutely right. He has the same build Picasso had,'' said Ivory, the director. ``Beyond that, I felt he was one of those actors - and they are rare - who can convincingly portray a man of genius.''

Fitted out with a deep tan, dark contact lenses to transform his piercing blue eyes to brown, and a bald pate, Hopkins does look remarkably like the famous painter, a resemblance that seems to deepen with each frame of the movie.

Finding someone to play Gilot, a beauty whose paintings continue to be shown in galleries in Europe and America, was a bigger challenge.

After a long search in America, Britain and France, they settled on Natascha McElhone, 23, a British theater actress with classic, Audrey Hepburn-like beauty and an immediate screen presence, who makes a striking debut in the role.

McElhone, at a recent interview in Beverly Hills, said she was not quite as overwhelmed by her pairing with Hopkins as Gilot was by her initial matchup with Picasso.

``For one thing, I've known all my life that I wanted to be an actor, while for Francoise, part of the excitement was the discovery of her own destiny as a painter at the same time that she was entering this daring relationship,'' said McElhone, who comes across as intelligent, questioning and self- possessed as the woman she portrays. ``I've always been lucky in my work, but I must say that Tony (Hopkins) was lovely to work with. He has a great sense of fun, and he really listens to you; he always finds the time.''

Their meeting took place almost as it plays out on the screen, since they were thrust together without rehearsal. ``We actually met with him in the role of Picasso and me as Francoise, and I loved that, because the emotions come across as very vital and immediate,'' said McElhone, who seems unbowed by anything - not even the full and frank nudity that the role requires early on, when her character impetuously drops her clothes in Picasso's bedroom to announce her intentions.

``She approached the relationship as a challenge, in spite of the warnings she'd had from other women,'' McElhone said. ``I think she really knew what she was getting into, and she felt up to it. It was part of her discovery of herself as an artist.''

One of the more surprising aspects of Picasso illuminated in the movie is that despite his wealth, he offered no financial support to his live-in lovers, even when they bore him children.

``Francoise was able to make some money of her own on her paintings, and that had to do for her and the children,'' McElhone said. ``She had to make her own clothes, and when she was pregnant, she had to borrow his trousers because she couldn't fit into her own. And he went crazy at her for wearing them out.''

As Picasso's indifference grew and his affairs with other women became more blatant, Gilot finally decided she'd had enough. The death of her grandmother gave her an additional measure of financial independence, and she took the children and left. In the movie, Picasso says to her, ``You'll come crawling back,'' and she replies, ``I don't think you know the first thing about me.''

``What she meant was that she had spent 10 years getting to know him, and he hadn't spent any of that time getting to know her,'' said McElhone, who admits that she herself finds such self-involvement a mystery.

``It's their tunnel vision, obsession, that makes great artists,'' Hopkins said. ``Such artists don't have much time for people outside that, and it makes them abominably selfish, but then you say, `Well, that's the way they are.' Picasso was an extremely complex man. On the one hand, he was a puritan who disapproved of dancing, and on the other hand, he was one of the most libidinous, licentious figures of his time.

``He adored women, and yet he felt he had to dominate them and be in control of them all the time.

``I know people like this, and as the years go by and you watch them, they get older and more and more alone.''

On a personal level, Hopkins says he rejects the notion that an artist must be tyrannical to achieve his vision. But he says he himself ``can be pretty tough if I don't think somebody's doing their job,'' be it an agent - he's had several - or a director.

``I feel as though they should leave, or they should let me go.''

For his recent directorial debut, a movie called ``August'' that was a Welsh screen adaptation of Chekhov's ``Uncle Vanya'' in which he also starred as the title character, he adopted a certain mellowness, saying, ``I just did the best I could, and I didn't try to prove that I was Orson Welles or (Russian filmmaker Sergei) Eisenstein.''

In his own life, though, Hopkins admits to a love of solitude that is sometimes construed by others as selfish. His great enthusiasm for American life and California weather is not equally shared by his wife of 23 years, Jenni, and he currently resides in Pacific Palisades while she resides most of the time at their house in London.

``I'm quite gregarious around people, but I'd be quite happy without them,'' Hopkins said. ``I love the feeling of aloneness, and I never feel lonely. My wife doesn't understand this, but she accepts it.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Anthony Hopkins and Natascha Mc Elhone star in ``Surviving Picasso.''

(2) ``It's their tunnel vision, obsession, that makes great artists,'' Anthony Hopkins says of such masters as the title character he portrays in ``Surviving Picasso.''

(3) ``I've known all my life that I wanted to be an actor, while for Francoise, part of the excitement was the discovery of her own destiny as a painter at the same time that she was entering this daring relationship,'' Natascha McElhone says of playing Francoise Gilot, who survived Picasso.