The Singularity of Sagebrecht : The Bavarian’s movie portrayals are cracking the stereotype that an actress must be young, conventionally beautiful and slender.

The female archetypes who dominate the movie screen are notoriously unvaried. A woman has the option of being either young, slender and beautiful, old, wise and cantankerous, or she can play herself for laughs. The exceptions to the rule can almost be counted on one hand.

Bavarian actress Marianne Sagebrecht, star of Percy Adlon’s “Rosalie Goes Shopping,” throws the rule book out the window. Making her film debut in 1984 in Adlon’s “Sugarbaby,” Sagebrecht portrayed a portly morgue attendant who seduces a handsome young subway conductor with candy, attention, and her shameless sensuality. It was here that Sagebrecht introduced the radical persona she’s come to be identified with.

At 45, Sagebrecht is no ingenue, nor is she conventionally beautiful. Short and decidedly overweight, she builds her subtle performances around the idea of inner beauty, and her characters grow increasingly attractive through the course of her films. By the time the closing credits role, the men have all fallen in line and she’s perceived as a graceful and highly desirable woman. It’s the polar opposite of the angry fat woman stereotype typified by Roseanne Barr.

Briefly in Los Angeles from her home in Munich to do publicity for “Rosalie,” Sagebrecht offers an explanation for why audiences have accepted as a romantic leading lady someone who deviates so radically from the stereotype.

“I’ve met many people who’ve told me, Marianne, we are so happy to finally meet real human beings in a movie,” she says in rapid, excited bursts of heavily accented English. “They were waiting for people like me and they say we feel free with you because you don’t make us feel that we have to love you simply because you’re fat. And they appreciate that I don’t make jokes about myself. It’s easy to mock the characters you’re playing, to turn it into parody and say ‘This is not me.’ I don’t do that at all, and I accept the characters I play completely.”

Sagebrecht, who has had small roles in two American films (“Moon Over Parador” and “The War of the Roses”) made her greatest impact with critics here as the Bavarian housewife stranded in the Mojave Desert in Adlon’s 1986 “Bagdad Cafe.” In that film, her character’s inner beauty transformed a community of desert loners.

She plays a radically different character in “Rosalie Goes Shopping.” Based on an actual incident and shot in Little Rock, Ark., “Rosalie,” which also stars Brad Davis and Judge Reinhold, is the story of a peacetime Bavarian war bride who embraces consumerism with a vengeance. Providing for her family via a convoluted juggling act involving dozens of credit cards and rubber checks, “Rosalie” is simultaneously an indictment of the dark legacy of Reaganomics, and a quirky comedy.

“When I first offered Marianne this role she said, ‘Percy, no, this is something for Bette Midler,’ ” says Adlon, who considers “Rosalie” the third installment in the trilogy of films he’s done with Sagebrecht. “I convinced her by having her imagine Rosalie as the third sister in the family of women she’s played for me, and then she responded. Plus, I pointed out to her that her life has been plagued with money problems much like Rosalie’s.”

Agrees Sagabrecht: “It’s true that for years I was unable to win with money. I thought money stinks and comes from criminal organizations, and when people asked me to work I told them I had no price and always worked for nothing. Because of that I ended up deeply in debt.

“I have a conflicted relationship with money because I know that if you use it, it eventually ends up using you. I make more money now than I ever have before, but still I resist the seduction of money and it’s a temptation I struggle with every day. I turn down many offers because of this issue. I want to be free, so I give my money to my friends. For me, I need nothing. I have a little room, no TV, no car--living this way makes you strong.”

Born in Starnberg, Bavaria, in 1945, Sagebrecht remembers her German childhood as a time of innocence and freedom.

“I grew up in the countryside in a working class family. My father was killed in the war, and my mother was a seamstress at a hospital. I was with her alone for seven years before she married my stepfather and that was a special time for me. I was always in nature, and because my mother worked, I had time to myself and I discovered I had a lot of fantasies. Had I been part of a bourgeois family living in a city I would’ve been put in prison or a hospital for lunatics! I would have been forced to conform, but as it was, I had a lot of space to grow up.”

Sagebrecht’s performing career began in the early ‘70s when she managed a cabaret in Starnberg with her former husband, Fritz. Following the birth of their daughter and their divorce, she launched “Opera Curiosa” an eclectic cabaret/theater revue troupe that featured 180 performers from all over Europe which began touring in 1977.

Percy Adlon, the director who launched her film career, was struck by her 1977 performance as a prostitute in a small stage production in Munich, but the pair didn’t officially meet until 1979, when Adlon cast her as Sancho Panza’s wife in a modern version of “Don Quixote” made for German television. A few years later Adlon created “Sugarbaby” out of two chance encounters with Sagebrecht; he saw her dancing wildly at a cast party, then saw her floating in a swimming pool, silent and oblivious to the world. Those two images defined the parameters of her character in that film.

Sagebrecht credits Adlon’s extraordinary sensitivity to women as being central to her working relationship with him, and says “we have a magical way of working together. Percy is very close to his cast, and even if I close my eyes, I can feel his presence on the set. Initially I always resist giving myself over to his characters. I told him, all this loneliness in ‘Sugarbaby?’ Percy, please, I am not lonely and never have been, but that wasn’t true. Until we find a soul brother we are all lonely in the same way.”

Sagebrecht’s work with Adlon has won her considerable critical acclaim as well as a good deal of interest from Hollywood, but she remains marginally interested in the American film industry.

“After ‘Bagdad Cafe’ I got several very good offers but I said, ‘No, I need healing time now.’ And, having just made ‘Rosalie’ I’m really tired and empty, and I can’t think about doing a movie now.

“I wouldn’t come and live on this Hollywood hill and wait for a big career because I have no interest in working with big names,” she continues. “Plus, people work too hard in America. They have second jobs, sometimes a third--this is so sad. They work like animals and have no free space in their lives. The holidays here are so short--10 days a year! This is crazy! People are workaholics and they become very nervous and hysterical when they become ill or grow old because it’s not allowed here. This is such a pressure.”

In talking with Sagebrecht, one can’t help but be struck by her remarkable acceptance of herself. American culture is deeply rooted in the idea of self-improvement, but Sagebrecht likes herself fine just as she is.

“I like myself round,” she explains, “and I think the reason for that is because my mother accepted me. She looked in her garden and said, ‘What is this special flower? I don’t know this kind of flower,’ so she was very respectful and careful with me and never tried to destroy my special philosophy. Also, when I need to see a reflection of myself I look at my neighbor rather than in the mirror. People are my mirror and I feel secure with how I see myself in their eyes.”