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''I was brought up in a theater family, but that doesn't mean it was a constant Noel Coward play,'' Mr. Stephens, 30, said in his dressing room at the Belasco Theater, where he is starring in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of Jean Anouilh's ''Ring Round the Moon.'' ''My mom and dad went off to work, and they came home. I saw a lot of plays and understood that this was what some people did: they dressed up in funny clothes and pretended to be different people in different periods. And they earned money from it.''

Mr. Stephens is dressing up, earning money and, eight times a week, pretending to be two different people: Hugo and Frederic, identical twins with very unidentical personalities, in the French comedy directed by Gerald Gutierrez. His colleagues onstage include Marian Seldes, Simon Jones, Frances Conroy, Joyce Van Patten and Fritz Weaver.

Mr. Stephens received critical praise this year as Nero opposite Diana Rigg in the Almeida Theater Company production of Racine's ''Britannicus'' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and somewhat less praise as Hippolytus with Ms. Rigg in Racine's ''Phedre,'' also at the academy. In England he has frequently performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, most notably five years ago as Coriolanus. In The New York Times Vincent Canby wrote that as Nero Mr. Stephens possessed ''authority and intelligence on the stage,'' and Ben Brantley of The Times called the performance ''compellingly tormented.''

Wearing a black turtleneck and jeans, and possessing matinee-idol good looks, the personable Mr. Stephens -- whose father was Sir Robert Stephens, a Shakespearean actor who died in 1995 -- says that not unexpectedly his heritage and his early environment played a crucial role in his career decision.

''To me going into the theater and becoming an actor wasn't some kind of romantic notion that I aspired to because my dad was a welder,'' said Mr. Stephens, who trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. ''It was just what I saw people do. As a kid I did have ideas of becoming a surgeon, but I was too dumb for it. I figured out early on that I wanted to be an actor, because it was the only thing I could really do well. At school I was never particularly academically brilliant. But I found that when we had poetry competitions, I had a facility for it.''

That facility is on view at the Belasco in Anouilh's tale of twins who think they are in love with the same woman and of their domineering aunt (Ms. Seldes) who knows better. Hugo, 10 minutes older -- ''who would have thought that those 10 minutes would have taught me so much about women,'' the character says -- is cynical, scheming, supremely self-confident, suave, debonair and heartless, ''the one who doesn't blush.'' Frederic is shy and uncertain, awkward and dejected, slumped and sighing, but the one with a good heart.

''The play isn't a farce, but it's almost a farce,'' Mr. Stephens said. ''It's a comedy with serious undertones. Hugo is driven by a kind of ennui with life, because he has this incredibly quick mind. Frederic is obsessed by the idea of love. He's a hopeless romantic who enjoys the pain of it: he takes a perverse pleasure in his depression. It's like two halves of one personality, and if they were somehow fused you'd have the most wonderful person.''

Playing such different characters, and switching back and forth almost instantaneously from one to the other is, Mr. Stephens said, very much a matter of practice.

''It's essential not to get too involved with the differences between them,'' he said. ''You don't want to be left with these incredibly gnarled personalities. You just play it as it's written. And the way you achieve facility going back and forth from one to the other is through constant rehearsal. In rehearsal you can go as far with a personality as you want, and then you pare it down to the essentials. And then it becomes an instinctive thing, through rehearsing it again and again.''

What grounds him in each character, he says, is ''physicality.''

''It starts with a posture,'' he said. ''You find that physicality in each of them, without making it grotesque or awkward. I normally work pretty instinctively toward that. You find the kind of gesture they would use. And then, for me, the voice and everything else falls into that groove.''

Mr. Stephens's parents' marriage broke down when he was 4, and he did not see his father for about 10 years. He called his father Robert, he said; Dad was his stepfather, Beverley Cross, a playwright and librettist who died last year. His knowledge of his father came mostly from the movies, especially ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'' (1969), in which the elder Mr. Stephens portrayed Dame Maggie's lover.

''We moved to America and Canada, and I didn't see Robert for a long time,'' he said. ''But then toward the end of his life I got to know him at the R.S.C.. He was in London and I was in Stratford, and then he was in Stratford when I was in London. It wasn't a traditional father-son relationship. We didn't go fishing or anything like that. But we had an interest in each other's work. He was intrigued with my acting, fascinated seeing me doing parts he would have wanted to do when he was younger. We swapped ideas.''

The elder Mr. Stephens had a severe drinking problem through much of his career, and after almost two decades of minor roles returned in triumph, first as Falstaff in ''Henry IV'' in 1992 and then, in 1994, when his son was starring in ''Coriolanus,'' as Lear.

''I was glad to have known him before he died,'' Mr. Stephens said. ''I was incredibly proud of him, and I know he was proud of me. So as far as it went it was good.''

Mr. Stephens says he is hopeful that there will be more Shakespeare in his future. ''I would like to do 'Macbeth' as soon as possible,'' he said. ''And I think I might be doing it with Jonathan Kent at the Almeida in London next year,'' he said of his ''Britannicus'' and ''Phedre'' director. ''It's the one part I have an idea about, and I would like to play it while I'm still relatively young,'' he said. ''I see him as somebody just beyond 30, in the high pitch of ambition. Everybody asks me, 'When are you going to do Hamlet?' But at the moment I don't have an idea about the role, and if you're going to do it you have to have an idea.''

Sometimes for the offspring of actors it is parents who have ideas their children's roles. But Mr. Stephens says that with Dame Maggie that is not a problem. ''She loves coming to see me, and she's brilliant about not interfering,'' he says. ''We're not the same sex, so she can't actually say, 'Well, this is how you should do it.' Because she doesn't know. She always has an opinion of my work, but she certainly doesn't give me notes or anything like that.''

He pauses for a moment to think of other, less lucky children of the stars.

''I know a lot of people from acting backgrounds,'' he said. ''And they're terrified when their parents come to see them. They get endless notes. That for me would be a nightmare. But what's great about our relationship is that that doesn't really become a part of it.''

Источник: http://query.nytimes.com/