The introspective monologue about Maude's fantasies, jealousies and imminent 50th birthday had left the actress emotionally exhausted. It also stirred up some anguishing personal memories: the father Bea hated; the trials of growing up as too-tall, contralto-voiced Bernice Frankel; and her own analysis.

Driven back to her rustic Los Angeles residence, she absently nibbled at celery and cream cheese and tried to unwind with a couple of vodkas on the rocks. She just stared into the fireplace awhile, listening to the crickets outside and petting her pair of German shepherds before retiring for the night.

Two hours later, she lay sprawled on the living room floor, her nightgown covered with blood.

Apparently she had been sleepwalking. Her husband of 25 years, stage and film director Gene Saks, was awakened by a crashing flower pot and plant stand; he found her stunned and screaming for help. A doctor, who used seven stitches in the messy scalp wound, blamed the accident on a combination of emotional tension, drinking and extreme fatigue.

There are now no residual signs of the incident in the beam-ceilinged living room of Bea's recently acquired and refurbished $200,000 home. The blood stains have been removed. A healthy schefflera has been placed in a new, handpainted pot.

Calmly sipping vodka, she reached for a pack of cigarettes, hidden from her disapproving husband, under a chair cushion. She wore a beige blouse, rust-colored tunic and roomy jeans. Blowing smoke into the air, crossing her tennis sneakers and stretching out on the sofa, she could have passed for a 50-ish housewife on cleaning day, taking a break from the afternoon soaps.

"I do not think you will ever have seen anything like it in your life," she said of her one-woman Maude episode, which triggered her accident, and which she thought was certain to earn her another Emmy nomination. "I mean that without immodesty."

Her failure to win an Emmy after three seasons in a long-established hit show is especially irritating, a distinct blow to her sizeable ego. "I was nominated in 1973 and I didn't get it," she recalled, spitting out the words like jalapeño peppers. "The same thing happened in 1974, I assumed I would win because there is no one else like me. I can't be compared to Mary Tyler Moore. In 1975, I was not even nominated! That was shocking. To this moment, I still can't believe it."

Bea later suggested that a vulgar public display by Bill Macy, the actor who plays her husband, Walter, cost her the Emmy. At a Hollywood dinner honoring Maude creator Norman Lear and his partner, Bud Yorkin, Macy topped off some drunken, expletive-ridden remarks with a well-known obscene gesture. "He's a baby," she observed, perfunctorily dismissing his behavior.

Oddly enough, Bea had been reluctant to become involved in a television series. She was content to remain in the background, raising her two sons and doing only occasional film and theater roles, while her husband's directing career flourished.

Norman Lear had first met Bea and Gene Saks in 1959, when they were virtually broke, after he hired her for $600 a shot for The George Gobel Show, then in its last year. It folded five weeks after she joined the cast. But for the next decade, Lear and his politically active wife, Frances, remained close friends of the Sakses. In 1971, when Lear heard that Bea would be flying West to visit Gene, who was directing the movie version of "The Last of the Red Hot Lovers," he finally prevailed upon her -- after many long-distance entreaties -- to appear in the specially tailored, politically oriented All in the Family role of Edith Bunker's liberal cousin.

Bea was still dubious, even after CBS placed Maude in an enviable time slot on the fall schedule. She hated to leave behind the family's country home in suburban Westchester County, N.Y. She was required to fly to Los Angeles only four days after the completion of an $8000 kitchen remodeling in their Manhattan condominium. And she felt a white-knuckle fear of flying.

"If you have enough vodka and you start early enough in the morning, particularly if it's an 8 o'clock flight, then it's OK," she said, reaching behind a cushion for another cigarette. "Once I get up there and everything's serene, I'm fine. I don't worry again until we descend."

Fearing the worst, Bea rented a house in Beverly Hills for only 13 weeks. Realization that the show was a hit came only when she arrived at a premiere of "Mame" -- in which she recreated her Tony Award-winning Broadway role--and a band and chorus performed "And Then There's Maude."

Writer/exective producer Rod Parker knew he had a winner from the outset. "This lady's perfect timing and fantastic talent is just unbelievable," he noted then, as he does today. "If she loves a line of dialogue or a bit of business and she wants to take a big laugh and make it into a big scream, she'll challenge the audience by holding off until the last possible second. Then when she finally does it, they'll go bananas. That takes a lot of courage and it gives the writer a bonus. Jackie Gleason is about the only one I ever worked with who could do that same thing."

On the other hand, Mrs. Bea Frankel -- the actress's 75-year-old widowed mother -- could not believe the show would become a hit. As a hedge against failure, she faithfully calls her daughter each week to discuss the ebb and flow of ratings and criticize some of the material -- which she finds too racy.

The graying actress reached her present height of 5 feet 9½ inches by the time she was 12. Her conspicuous size worked to her advantage in the 1954 off-Broadway production of "The Three Penny Opera," in which she played strumpet Lucy Brown. It proved an unsettling disadvantage soon after when she performed with a summer-resort acting company that included Arte Johnson and Dick Shawn.

The climax of one weekend revue was a seaside musical number with the chorus in bathing suits. Looming nearly a head taller than anyone else, a situation that could have ruined the choreographer's insistence upon symmetry. Bea was relegated to "rowing" a boat across the stage.

"If I had been chorus size," she recalled, "I don't think I ever would have been Maude. There never would have been a need. Fortunately, my training taught me that even if you have to row across the stage, you think to yourself, 'I am a star. I will do it and I will make it great'."

What made Maude great was a personification that prompted women viewers to identify with an essentially strident, bellicose character. Shows like Maude's abortion, her hysterectomy, and the five-parter about a marital rift, caused by her campaign for state assembly, brought thousands of letters from viewers interested in substantially more than autographed 8x10 glossies.

Frustrated housewives compared her to Joan of Arc. Feminist groups lauded her as one of the more highly visible symbols of the women's movement.

"At the risk of doing away with my entire series, I must say that I have never known what the women's struggle was about," she protests. "When people prostrate themselves and wail: 'Oh, what you have done for women,' I don't understand it. I really don't know what all the movement screaming is about. I've never felt that being a wife and mother is not enough. I've never felt secondary to my husband."

She is asked whether she favors the equal-rights ammendment bill still pending in the state of California. "Tell me what that is," Bea earnestly replies. "Having only been involved in theater, I'm not aware of it."

A similar naivete existed about abortion, discussed in a 1972 Maude two-parter that generated a lot of mail containing photographs of fetuses.

"I never thought of a fetus being an unborn child," she says, knocking a cigarette into an ashtray. "When the script arrived, I didn't question it. All I thought was: 'Oh, my God, of course!' I can't imagine anything more heartbreaking in this world than an unwanted child or an unwanted animal. Most of my mail came from very bright, genuinely concerned people. They weren't nutsies writing to harass me. As a result, all I've arrived at is a state of complete confusion. If I were presented the same script now, I really don't know what I'd do. It would give me pause."

Only twice in the first 81 Maude episodes has Bea questioned the script judgement of Parker and Lear. Each time she was proved wrong.

At first glance, she was embarrassed by the ultimately provocative episodes about Walter's alcoholism, which she said were little better than soap operas. Critics extolled the finished products.

The script in which she was to sing "Hard Hearted Hannah" as part of an amateur musical revue seemed terribly dull, a piece of fluff.

"I can't do it," she told Lear. "This is ridiculous. The script isn't good enough to carry the music. The music isn't good enough to carry the script. What are we gonna do?"

"Look," Lear explained. "You can't go on, week after week, hitting people over the head, doing things that are deep and meaningful. You have to do something occasionally that's just fun."

Then there was the time that Bea's instincts, although somewhat self-indulgent, inspired a perfectly workable concept for a two-parter.

In the first segment, Maude and Walter would agree to her having plastic surgery. The series would then take a short vacation, during which Bea would have a real face lift. In the second episode, Maude/Bea would reveal her streamlined visage to the Nation, capitalizing on the publicity just as Phyllis Diller once did.

Bea was serious. She consulted a prominent Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon, but he turned her away.

"I won't do it," said the surgeon. "I absolutely will not operate on you. It's ridiculous. Your skin is not ready for it." As he chased her out of his office, Bea half-seriously thought, "God is gonna get him for this."

That catch-phrase, more than any other, has become synonymous with the Maude characterization. Furthermore, it has been borrowed by dozens of comedians -- the ultimate accolade.

While Maude is into liberal politics, Bea stumps for low-cost spaying and neutering, along with equal rights for animals. She had modeled gowns for charity fashion shows, benfiting Actors and Others for Animals. She has signed autographs, posed for photographs and puckered-up for 50-cent kisses at pet fairs. Her signature has also appeared on petitions to abolish the steel-jaw leg-hold trap.

Her life away from the set is hopelessly mundane by traditional Hollywood standards. Parties bore her. On visits to celebrated restaurants, her outfit scarcely varies from jeans and tennis shoes. After months of searching, she finally found a supermarket that sells fresh dill, a key ingredient for her speciality of the kitchen -- marinated chicken salad. She's concerned about the tight-money economy: no buyers can be found for either her Manhattan apartment or her weekend retreat.

Her husband, who once denounced California as a cultural wasteland, changed his opinion when he discovered tennis and built a court adjacent to Bea's exotic bathroom -- where she can slosh in a step-down tub while gazing through a floor-to-ceiling window at an illuminated bamboo garden.

She feels guilty about being away too often from her family, which functions as a normal unit only on weekends during the six months a year that Maude is in production. She expresses concern when she hears that classmates of her 11-year-old son, Daniel, teasingly call him Maude.