NEW YORK -- Oscar-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden has had a busy 2007, with several films in theatres including The Invisible, Hoax, Canvas, Into The Wild, Rails & Ties and The Mist.

In most of the movies, Harden was playing someone's mom, although Canvas featured her as a schizophrenic mother.

So , it was a nice change of pace for the actress to chew some major dramatic and comedic scenery as a smalltown Maine religious zealot in The Mist, based on the Stephen King horror novella about a group of people trapped in a supermarket with monstrous bugs waiting to attack outside.

"Every film, I've done this year, I've absolutely loved," said Harden, 48.

"Some of them are harder because you can tell press didn't love them, even though I did. Talking about (The Mist) is easy because it's a film I like. Doing it was actually a lot of work. It was work, but it was fun work. It was absolute character development and backstory and creating the look."

And that's where the debate between Harden and The Mist director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), occurred about how her character, Mrs. Carmody, would look in the film.

In the book, she's an overweight, unattractive woman in a yellow pantsuit, but Harden came up with five wildly different character choices.

Darabont was leaning toward "the nun," while Harden opted for less severe "the preacher's daughter."

Other possibilities included "the shopping cart lady who wanted to be a mom," "the environmental angry hippie" and "the Tammy Faye."

"I fought for preacher's daughter, because I thought she could go further and she'd be more fun and I thought it could be a little more sexual as power came upon her," Harden said.

"And that here's a woman who ostensibly is a virgin, there's no husband, there's no Mr. Carmody, even though she calls herself Mrs. Carmody, so there's enormous backstory."

She even studied the voices of TV and radio evangelists -- "I listened to the rhythms" -- and bought the Idiot's Guide to Revelations.

Still, Harden, who won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in 2000's Pollock and was nominated again in the same category for 2003's Mystic River, almost didn't do The Mist.

"Initially, I was shooting Rails & Ties, when I this part came to me and at first, honestly, I turned up my nose and I thought, 'Bug movie? I don't think so!' " she recalled. "You know because 'horror.' I thought, 'Are people going to be screaming -- Ahhhhhh! -- with blood on their face?' Like it has to be minutely sexy if you do it except that I'm not the sexy one, so it'll be disgusting.

"So I thought, 'I don't want to do that.'

"But then what was compelling about the story was the Lord of the Flies element of these people in this store."

Harden said she doesn't think of her film roles in terms of whether they will win her awards, but judging from audiences reaction to the fate of her character The Mist -- it produces the loudest cheer -- she underestimated the impact of Mrs. Carmody.

"Sometimes you pick something and you think, 'Wow, this is going to take me to a place that is deeper, asks more of me, than I would expect.' And for me, I didn't think it would be this one. I almost didn't do this film because, like I said, 'Is it just going to be a bug movie?'

"But I thought the performances that would have different notice, if you want me to be brutally honest, would have been Canvas or Rails & Ties because they were disintegrating characters.

"But they didn't and so you never know. You do it and you throw it out there and you say, 'I don't own it anymore.' "

Making movies a family affair for Harden, kids

Actress Marcia Gay Harden said she never would let her 9-year-old daughter and budding thespian, Eulala, attend a screening of her horror film, The Mist, which features horrific bug creatures.

However, her 31/2-year-old twins, Julitta and Hudson, did visit the Shreveport, La., set where Harden (Pollack, Mystic River) filmed the movie.

"The CGI guys showed them the bugs and they were terrified in the beginning and then they said, 'Look how you can touch it! It's not real! It's fake!' " Harden said. "It was fun to have them on set, it was good."

Harden, who has been married since 1996 to prop man Thaddaeus Scheel (with whom she worked on The Spitfire Grill), recently got to combine family life with work when she starred opposite Eulala in a low-budget indie film called Home, which she hopes will be released in 2008.

"I'm a 1960s early survivor of a mastectomy, of cancer, and my character is a poet. It's based on the director's mother, but she's an alcoholic, and my daughter, Eulala, is the young girl who's really trying to get her mother to be her mother again," Harden said.

And their working relationship? "I would work with her again in an heartbeat," Harden said. "She's dying to have a movie that I'm not in.

"There's another movie, she's up for a part and there would be a role for me and she's like, 'Please mom, don't audition for it.' She wants to be on her own. She wants to feel who she is. Listen, I think she'd probably have a more enjoyable time if I wasn't there, on some level, because I'm harder on her than other people and I demand more from her than other people. I'm like, 'Sit now! Put that down now!' And so I embarrass her."