Working Actor

A ngst has become commonplace for Peter Gallagher. Playing Angst , that is.

On Wednesday, he stars in the PBS “American Playhouse” production of Clifford Odets’ “The Big Knife” (9 p.m., Channels 28 and 15) as a ‘40s movie star whose integrity, marriage and career are disintegrating.

His last television outing was as the Jewish victim of a lynch mob in “The Murder of Mary Phagan.” Before that, he spent eight months opposite Jack Lemmon in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

Does all that doom and gloom get the actor down? Nah .

“Mom may be running around with a spike in her arm and Dad’s a miser and my brother’s a drunk and I’m dying of tuberculosis,” he says, referring to “Long Day’s Journey,” “but if the show goes well, you feel like a million bucks at the end. There’s also a tremendous relief that you don’t have to do it again for another 21 hours.”

Lately, the periods between work have grown slimmer and slimmer for Gallagher. In August he begins filming “Sex, Lies and Videotape” for director Steven Soderbergh. He just finished a stint at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. Before that he worked on the upcoming TV-movie “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Before that , he was in England and Ireland filming “High Spirits” for “Mona Lisa” director Neil Jordan. And before that , he did Robert Altman’s TV version of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.”

He also squeezed in a few episodes of the now-defunct series “Private Eye.”

It’s been a steady career climb since “The Idolmaker” (1980), in which Gallagher played Caesare, a shy busboy who’s molded into a teen singing star: “Before ‘Idolmaker’ came out, everyone was saying ‘This is gonna hit really big.’ I was the cynic, saying ‘Yeah, yeah.’ ”

As it turned out, his cynicism was well founded. “They had posters everywhere, saying ‘Caesare is coming.’ People were saying ‘Who the hell is Caesare?’ ”