BY CURT SCHLEIER

"Here's the thing," says Richard Dreyfuss, box-office powerhouse and, most recently, star of the widely acclaimed Mr. Holland's Opus. "I have to stop you right there. For one thing, I've talked so much about my personal life that I'm sick of it," he says. Certainly, he explains, "I have no fear of talking about it. But it bores the hell out of me.... I'm not averse to having an interview, but this is such old news for me. My personal life and my problems in Hollywood, all that's like, yesterday. There must be something else."

A gifted performer, Dreyfuss brings a focused energy to all his roles: From the alienating fervor of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the twitchy intensity of Jaws, his characters virtually pulse with adrenalin. In so many of his dramatic films, he plays average guys, but average guys stretched to their emotional -- and physical -- limits. Moreover, Dreyfuss is remarkably versatile, throwing himself into comic roles with equal abandon. In The Goodbye Girl, Tin Men and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, he goes funny bone to funny bone with the best of them, and walks away smiling.

Perhaps more than skill, Dreyfuss may be most lauded for his willingness to take chances, to tackle major acting challenges like aging 25 years in Mr. Holland's Opus, flexing his moxie in action films like Stakeout and Another Stakeout, and convincingly conveying the agony of a suicidal quadriplegic in Whose Life Is It, Anyway?.

And now, after years of achievement in film, Dreyfuss is dabbling in a new medium: He recently came out with his first novel, a fantastical odyssey of history and adventure called The Two Georges.

Still, despite all the success, Dreyfuss cannot avoid questions about The Subject. The Subject, of course, is his roller-coaster ride of a career -- his rise in the filmmaking firmament, his plummet to Hollywood hell and, now, his striking comeback. It is a saga almost as riveting as any role he has played on the big screen.

Dreyfuss' story begins back in Brooklyn, where he was born to an attorney father and a housewife mother. His family moved to a somewhat tonier neighborhood in Queens when he was two, and finally settled in Los Angeles when he was eight.

The family, Dreyfuss recalls, was fairly traditional and certainly aware of its Jewish roots, but, he says, they were not particularly committed to religious prescriptions. He remembers once asking why his father didn't practice Judaism. His father responded: "I don't have to practice. I'm very good at it."

His father did, however, feel obligated to expose Richard to Judaism so he could make up his own mind about religion. At a young age, says Dreyfuss, his father suggested that he study at the local Reform synagogue, either for his bar mitzva or for confirmation. " 'You have a choice [between the two],' " he recalls his father saying, " 'I'll describe both to you, but I'm not going to prejudice you either way.' "

He then went on to say, "'Bar mitzvah is boring. It's dull. It's stupid. You don't want to do that. All you do is learn language. In confirmation, you learn history and ethics. It's exciting and you argue and you debate.' So, naturally, I chose confirmation," says Dreyfuss, "not realizing that it meant seven years of going to temple, not three." But by the time he was 13, he admits, "I was really in love with going to temple, not the religious part of it, but the classes and the debates with the rabbi.... It was a great way of having an intellectual interplay."

And the experience stayed with him. "I grew up with a number of stories my rabbis told me, and when you're a kid, you get things imprinted on your hard disk that are very hard to abandon. I was told a story about a man who said to Hillel, 'Explain Judaism to me while I stand on one foot, and I'll convert.' Hillel said, 'Raise your foot. Do not do unto others what you would not have others do unto you. That is Judaism. The rest in commentary. Go study.'

"That was meaningful to me," says Dreyfuss, who has since become very involved in community activism and Israeli affairs. He was, for example, an early and vocal proponent of the peace movement in Israel and continues to serve on the board of Americans for Peace Now.

"Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is very meaningful to me," he says. "Repairing the world and getting justice. To me, my involvement in Israeli politics was simply about that, that we are a people who stand for a certain thing, a certain sense of justice and freedom.... We must do right by the world. We must not treat the world as the world treats us. That was it. That was the impulse."

That same impulse inspired Dreyfuss to join with other concerned activists to found L.A. Works, an organization that pairs volunteers with community projects. "I thought there were a lot of things that needed to be done in a community such as Los Angeles, little things that sometimes get overlooked by big causes and budget crises, but [which determine] the kind of atmosphere we live in -- things like painted walls and day-care centers and gymnasiums and sand boxes. I also knew there was a huge volunteer spirit here. Many people I knew were constantly saying to me, I would like to help but I don't know where to go. So I thought I would put the two together."

At one point, Dreyfuss thought he'd become more than just a political activist; he wanted to be a player. But this youthful ambition soured as he grew older. "My level of respect for politics went down as my level of reality went up. I found the idea of involving myself in the pursuit of electoral office made me uncomfortable. It has become the pursuit of money." Another obstacle, he contends, is the media, particularly television, which has placed itself between elected officials and their constituencies. And then there's another matter. "I have the kind of history that wouldn't get past the first press conference," he admits.

Ah, yes. Once again, The Subject.

In addition to his interest in politics Dreyfuss also had an early interest in acting. In fact, he says, it probably would have been a mistake for him to pursue any other career. "This is," he says simply, "what I was meant to do."

He began dabbling in acting at the age of nine, at the Westside Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles and, he says, "I haven't stopped since." He briefly attended San Fernando Valley State College and then spent two years in alternative service at a Los Angeles hospital as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He soon began to pursue a career in acting and, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had bit parts in episodic television and films (including one line in The Graduate), and appeared both on Broadway and off. His breakthrough came in 1973, when he was featured in the ensemble hit American Graffiti, which boosted the careers of almost everyone associated with it, including Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford and Mackenzie Phillips. In it, he captured the adolescent angst of a young man agonizing over his future -- and the whereabouts of an unknown beautiful woman.

In relatively short order, he appeared in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and The Goodbye Girl (also 1977), thereby assuring his position in the Hollywood firmament -- or so it would seem.

At around this same time, Dreyfuss developed his Laughing Gods Theory, his notion that the higher powers occasionally enjoy a perverse laugh at the expense of mere mortals. When things are going badly, the theory says, the gods may inexplicably proffer a run of good luck or -- as in his case -- when things are going well, they may hurl down a few loaded thunderbolts.

The theory conveniently explains what happened next: Dreyfuss became addicted to drugs and alcohol. A more likely explanation, however, may be that rapid success and the L.A. lifestyle took their toll on the young actor. In 1982, in a highly publicized incident, Dreyfuss wrapped his Mercedes around a Los Angeles palm tree, and although he emerged relatively unscathed, the cops found cocaine and Percodan in the vehicle.

There followed a court-mandated rehabilitation, after which his record was expunged. But, to quote the title of what was to be his comeback film, Dreyfuss was down and out in Beverly Hills: Between 1981 and '86 he appeared in only three movies; in previous years, and since his comeback, he came out with an average of one a year.

But the Laughing Gods would soon strike again. In 1983, Dreyfuss met and married Jeramie Rain, and soon became a father with the birth of Emily, the first of his three children.

Still Dreyfuss faced more trials. Jeramie's pregnancy exacerbated her lupus, a debilitating condition which was so painful at one point that she could not even hold her daughter. And in June 1986, their son Benjamin was born with a rare birth defect that left him permanently blind in one eye. A third child, Harry, was born six years ago.

Whether it was the challenge of adversity, the support of his new family, or just the Laughing Gods at work again, around the time of Ben's birth, Dreyfuss' career experienced a resurgence that has lasted until today. Down and Out in Beverly Hills was followed shortly by Stand By Me (Dreyfuss' close buddy Rob Reiner asked him to narrate), Nuts (with Barbra Streisand), and Tin Men.

He and his wife are apart now, but he remains close to the children. Asked if he and Jeramie might get together again, he laughs a booming thunderclap of a laugh that has all the intensity of his acting, and lets a reporter know it's none of his business.

He laughs again when asked what might make a man like him happy. "If I knew the answer to that," he says, "I'd be the richest or wisest man on earth."

He may not be the wisest man on earth, but he has certainly learned a good deal since his early days in the industry. "The difference between me now and me then is that then I insisted on being taken as a vivid character," he says. "I did not want to be like other people. So I made [some outrageous] statements the press could quote. I have no need to do that now."

One way Dreyfuss has been "vivid" is his insistence on remaining identifiable as a Jew. "As a child," he recalls, "I played the part of provocateur. I always wanted to provoke people, and I spent a lot of time in the '70s provoking the press. And probably part of my impulse to introduce myself as 'Richard-Hi-I'm-Jewish' was part of that," he admits. But, he notes, "the other part of it is that I've always felt intensely proud of being Jewish. So there never was any thought of hiding it. It was something that was always part of me."

He adds that he does not feel that other celebrities are embarrassed by their Jewish heritage. "I've met very few Jews who are ashamed of their Judaism," he says. "For the most part, at least for my generation, the idea of the self-hating Jew is an antique literary thing. I'm not saying that things go on forever, but America is a place of vast accomplishments for Jews. You'd have to expend a lot of effort to be ashamed of yourself as a Jew."

Today, Dreyfuss is obviously a man at ease with himself. As he says, "I don't know how I'm viewed and I don't care. I'm older and hopefully wiser, and the way the world views me is far less important." Looking ahead to the future, though, could it all possibly slip away from him again?

It hardly seems likely. He has two films in the can, Sidney Lumet's Night Falls on Manhattan and Trigger Happy, both scheduled for fall release. He produced the latter, a gangster comedy. Since his Academy Award nomination and the success of Mr. Holland, Dreyfuss has been inundated with scripts.

He is also pleased with his book, The Two Georges, which he co-wrote with science fiction/fantasy author Harry Turtledove. Part of a genre called "what if?" or alternate history, the story takes place in a contemporary America that never revolted against the British. The relationship between the North American Union, as the U.S. is known, and the British Empire is threatened when a separatist group steals an icon of the relationship: a Gainsborough painting of King George and George Washington. Dreyfuss explains that the wacky historical concept was entirely his, and that he worked closely with Turtledove to complete the manuscript.

Clearly, Dreyfuss is in a very comfortable place in his life -- and mature enough this time around to handle his success. As he looks back, despite all the disappointments, he says it is a life well lived. "My life is the life I set out to live," he says. "I'm an itinerant player. That's what I set out to be. I have had successes and failures, but the sum of my professional life is absolutely dazzling."