HOLLYWOOD -- Jeff Bridges made his movie debut as an infant, cuddled in Jane Greer's arms in the moody romantic melodrama The Company She Keeps.

The year was 1950. He was a few months old. By 1971, then an eager 21-year-old breaking away from the long shadow cast by his beloved father Lloyd Bridges, he was being taken seriously, scoring an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor for his edgy performance in Peter Bogdanovich's stunning Americana film The Last Picture Show. With that breakthrough, Bridges could look forward to establishing his own niche, like his dad and his elder brother Beau Bridges.

Now, at the age of 51, Jeff Bridges is starring in the new maybe-alien drama K-PAX, which is being released across North America on Friday. He is allowing himself a new luxury: Looking back on a lifetime spent before the camera.

"I do," he tells The Sun. "I can pat myself on the back and say: 'It's an accomplishment, man, pretty damn good!' "

Bridges is not being a braggart, as cocky as he sounds. In 20 years of interviews with The Sun, he has never swaggered, thrown a hissy fit or indulged his ego. Others agree he is one of the sweetest, most professional people in the business. K-PAX producer Lawrence Gordon says that if he had filmed Bridges and his co-star, Kevin Spacey, at work together, the footage would serve as a how-to-do-it for every young actor around.

So, if this isn't bragging, what is it? Bridges says his wife, Susan Geston -- whom he met and married in 1975 while filming Rancho Deluxe on the dude ranch where she worked -- took his movie scripts years ago and had them bound in leather. Each new script gets the same treatment, with photos, souvenirs and other mementos included.

"Now, in my office at home, I have a shelf and there's 40 or 50 -- I don't know how many I've done -- and they're all up there," Bridges says. "So they are wonderful memories to go through. It's just the visual of looking up and seeing all those different titles and remembering all the work and the challenges and the tears and the people and all that."

His dad, who worked until two days before his death at the age of 85 in March of 1998, was a perfect role model for a Hollywood career, says his still awe-struck, loving son. "He was such a game guy, so versatile, and such a great guy, too."

Bridges' wife, the mother of their three teenaged daughters, is the perfect mate for an actor, he says.

He calls her "my real leading lady," waxing romantic about how important she is in his private and public life. "She allows me to do what I like to do. But she also really supports me, it's beyond allowing. I get this image of her holding this kite string and she allows me to fly out. That is a precious thing."

She let him fly out on K-PAX, a movie in which Bridges co-stars as a cynical New York psychiatrist who finds himself deeply affected and transformed by a new patient. He is an eccentric, homeless man (played by Spacey) who claims to be Prot, a friendly alien visitor from a planet called K-PAX.

Bridges has done the alien thing before, except he played the visitor, in the beguiling 1984 movie Starman. In that movie, the audience is supposed to believe Bridges was from outer space. In K-PAX, there is doubt and ambiguity at the end of the movie.

"I definitely thought of it when I picked up the script," Bridges says of the resonances of Starman in the new movie. "That came to mind as something to put in the mix. It's a movie about an alien. I guess I've been offered the Karen Allen role (as the person) who represents the audience while they're solving the puzzle of this guy.

"But, as far as not doing it because it is an alien thing -- no. It was just too interesting a project and it was also a chance to work with Kevin, whom I've admired for a long time."

It's another experience for the memory bank, another leather-bound script for the shelf. Jeff Bridges is a happy man.


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