Diane Lane Back Onstage in "Sweet Bird of Youth" IT has been 23 years since the actress Diane Lane performed onstage, and the emotionally grueling rehearsals for her return - in the Goodman Theater's revival here of Tennessee Williams's 1959 play "Sweet Bird of Youth" - had her a bit tired on a recent morning. She apologized twice for being sleepy, her famously beautiful face fighting droop. But when the conversation turned to the monstrousness of her character, the Princess Kosmonopolis, a faded movie star hiding out incognito in a Gulf Coast hotel, Ms. Lane sprang to life and even began beating her palm against her chair to emphasize her points. The Princess, you see, is the sort of character - cruel, manipulative, desperate - that Ms. Lane dreamed of playing when she was a child actress in New York in the 1970s, when she was cast as offspring in Andrei Serban's Off Off Broadway productions of "Medea," "Electra" and other classics. She became absorbed watching actresses a few feet away play these self-destructive title characters, and for years she missed the roles as she was cast as pretty young things in the 1980s movies "The Outsiders" and "The Cotton Club" and later as unhappy women in "Unfaithful" (for which she was nominated for an Academy Award) and "Nights in Rodanthe." "I've thought for a long time now, I just want to play a bitch, and believe me, I'm capable of it," said Ms. Lane, now 47, as she leaned forward in her chair and gave her palm a rest. Must female characters always be appealing? Must we always be - what's that word, I always block on it - sympathetic? That apple-pie-American thing: The likable ingénue? You're either playing Cinderella or else one of the jealous sisters or the evil stepmother. Oh, no, I can be all of those things. You can ask my husband - and my ex-husband. Ms. Lane said she has also been chomping at the bit to go back to theater, now that her daughter - with her first husband, the actor Christopher Lambert - is in college. For the last couple of years Ms. Lane (who is married to the actor Josh Brolin) had been working with the theater director Michael Wilson to bring another Williams classic, "The Night of the Iguana," to Broadway but timing and casting have not aligned. In a twist, she owes her new role to another Broadway project that did not come together: a revival of "Sweet Bird" that was to star Nicole Kidman as the Princess but that fell apart when James Franco pulled out as the play's other main character, the gigolo Chance Wayne. The director of that Broadway outing was to be David Cromer, the auteur of the recent acclaimed Off Broadway production of "Our Town." Mr. Cromer had been trying to get a "Sweet Bird" production off the ground for years, having become smitten in the sixth grade with the 1962 movie version starring Geraldine Page and Paul Newman. After the Kidman-Franco pairing fell through, he turned to the Goodman Theater, where he had ties from his years working in Chicago, and got the go-ahead to mount this production, which was scheduled to begin performances on Friday and runs through Oct. 25. Mr. Cromer recalled being given a list of actresses who might play the Princess here, and Ms. Lane's name instantly took hold of his imagination. "Diane possesses all the verisimilitude of this character for the audience," he said. She's this raw, exciting, gorgeous actress who became a glamorous star when she was young - Natalie Wood times 100 - and has had to find her way through a long career. His only concern - whether Ms. Lane would be tough enough to put aside vanity in playing the Princess - was allayed when they met for a meal near her home in Los Angeles. "She wanted to strip everything onstage that might seem superficial," he said. "Sweet Bird of Youth" is one of Williams's last major plays, written after he won the Pulitzer Prize for "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1948 and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in 1955, and it is certainly one of his most lurid. The first act is largely a duet in a hotel room between the hashish-smoking Princess (whose real name is Alexandra del Lago) and Chance, an aspiring actor who trades sexual favors in hopes that she will give him entree to Hollywood. They have come to Chance's hometown so he can try to win back his childhood love, yet he faces the threat of castration from her father, a political boss who is one of several grotesquely drawn characters in the drama. Ms. Lane had little familiarity with "Sweet Bird" before Mr. Cromer called on her but said she had a flash of recognition after reading the play: The Princess was the sort of stage gorgon that she spent her childhood around. She was 6 years old, a spunky Manhattan kid who had just lost her front baby teeth, when her father, Burt, drove her to the East Village in his taxi for children's auditions at La MaMa E.T.C. She insisted on going in alone and marched up to the top floor of the theater, where she announced to a roomful of longhaired artists, "I'm here for the job." The next few years were a kind of apprenticeship under Mr. Serban, performing in his productions of Greek classics at La MaMa and at summer theater festivals across Europe. She found a more stable family in the theater, she said, as her mother - a singer and Playboy centerfold - and her father had a tempestuous relationship. "I felt kind of rescued by Ellen Stewart," Ms. Lane said of the legendary leader of La MaMa, "and I had all these surrogate parents in the acting company when we were abroad. They had to put aside their hedonistic-20-year-old-in-Amsterdam mentality and ask each other: Who's going to take care of the girl tonight? At 12 Ms. Lane was in the ensemble of Mr. Serban's "Cherry Orchard" with Irene Worth, Raul Julia and Meryl Streep at Lincoln Center Theater, and months later Joseph Papp, the artistic director of the Public Theater, gave her a Cartier bracelet during rehearsals for the musical "Runaways" by Elizabeth Swados. Inscribed on it were two words: Someday Juliet. But whatever innocence she had would soon end during a falling out with Papp and the Public when they wanted her to move with "Runaways" to Broadway, and she opted to do her first film, "A Little Romance," with Laurence Olivier in 1979. That movie landed her on the cover of Time magazine, which proclaimed her one of "Hollywood's Whiz Kids" and led Olivier to describe her as the next Grace Kelly. But it also ended her run of stage roles.