The razzle-dazzle performance in 'The Paper Chase" by John Houseman as the Caligula of the classroom, the professor you love to hate; has won him an Academy Award nomination, and tended from the beginning to obscure the fact that there were other actors in the movie.

But there were, of course. Timothy Bottoms was fine as the Harvard law school student who seems to have decided that he can take suffering or leave it alone. And Lindsay Wagner was attractively and convincingly enigmatic as the profes­sor's daughter who appears not to know quite what the boys see in her father.

It was Ms. Wagner's second movie. I didn't see the first, 'Two People,' in which she was half the title opposite Peter Fonda.

I complained that "The Paper chase" left you unsure what the real truth was about any of the princi­pal characters. Was the prof a self-punishing hero or a posturing villain? A friend who survived Harvard law said, "That's what so great about the movie, because even when you were there you didn't know for sure. You never knew those guys."

And at that it's an allowable point of view for a film-maker to take, using the camera as spectator rather than as all-knowing godlike intelligence. And in that light the pleasure of Ms. Wagner's performance was that she gave you a lady of very intricate and quirky motivations.

She seemed not really to admire her father, yet was drawn to him, perhaps because she recog­nized that both of them enjoyed manipulating oth­er human beings. And she gave hints that the ma­nipulation she enjoyed most was undercutting the awe in which his students held her father. It was a characterization which suggested that there was more rather than less that met the eye.

The actress understood the part, probably be­cause the portrayer and the portrayed both have wills of steel. I discovered when we met a few weeks after 'The Paper Chase' first opened that Ms. Wagner had done the most unactory thing I ever beard of, which was turn down a career, or hold it at bay for nine years until she felt she was ready for it.

She was studying acting with James Best when she was in ninth grade, and out of a workshop production was offered a continuing part in an MGM series.

"I had long discussions with my coach and with my parents about the pros and cons of becoming a professional child actress. And what it came down to was whether you could do it and then become a good adult actress.

"If all your learning life is spent in front of the camera, all you're learning about is life in front of the camera. The coach's advice, and I've been grateful to him for it ever since, was given kind of kiddingly, but he said I had to be a people first and then an actress." She was 13.
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She finished high school in Oregon, attended the university for a year, did a lot of modeling, studied acting some more, sweated out a lot of family problems and made no move toward the career
until she was 22. "I wasn't ready for the pressure before that, and I knew it."

When she thought she was, she called a friend in the casting department at Universal and went in for interviews. The waiting turned out to be a good idea, or at least not to have been a bad idea.

She was cast in a small part in a Marcus Welby episode almost immediately and it led to a dozen more television guest shots before the year was over. They led to the co-starring part in "Two Peo­ple" and that led to James Bridges' 'The Paper Chase.' Just now she is finishing a 90-minute private eye movie for television, "The Rockfotd Files," oppo­site James Garner.

The number of would-be actors who are given the chance to turn down parts is shockingly small, and I expect Ms. Waener's example to be one of the least followed in the history of Hollywood. But the high-risk gamble that there would still be a career waiting nine years later paid off. And on the evidence of "The Paper Chase," the emotional re­sources that she could bring to the part served her better than an acting adolescence might have, with its emphasis on expertise rather than exper­ience.

Charles Champlin, The Los Angeles Times