Petula Clark may seem perfectly cast as Norma Desmond, the long-forgotten actress in "Sunset Boulevard" who's desperate to step back into the spotlight after a 30-year absence - except for two things.

First, Clark has seldom been out of the spotlight in her native England or the rest of western Europe, either before or after the recording career that brought her 15 Top 40 hits in the United States.

Second, she's not crying out for attention. She has never visited the idolatrous Web sites fans establish, and director Trevor Nunn needed three hours to talk her into appearing in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. Once in, though, she liked the part well enough to do it for a year in London, then join the American national tour that reaches Charlotte on Tuesday.

Americans tend to have blinkered visions of world culture, so most of us remember her as Pet Clark: icon of hip London in the Mod years, the Carnaby Street creation who cut the No. 1 hits "Downtown" and "My Love."

Even then, she was a decade older than overnight sensations who battled her on the charts. She'd been a show business veteran since she was 9, and she has used the years since the swinging mid-'60s to make concert tours and star in movies and stage musicals.

At 66, she says, she can still sing her pop tunes in the original keys. (At her age, some folks lower the keys to save vocal wear.) While touring, she soldiers on through theaters that have no air conditioning (Rochester, N.Y.) and theaters where the temperature is kept low enough to chill a lox (Buffalo).

Ask what she does to keep her voice in shape, and she replies, "Not much. I don't even vocalize a great deal (to prepare), because I'm not sure how to do it. I do warm up a little, because Norma has to sing 'With One Look' almost as soon as she hits the stage. v "When I first saw the show in London, I asked Elaine Paige how she coped with the part, and she said, 'I live like a nun.' That's her way of coping: She hardly speaks in the hours before the show. I thought, 'Whoa! Not for me!' My voice is actually stronger than in the '60s, and my range is bigger."

Clark also admits she thought "not for me" when asked to take over the part. She'd done "Blood Brothers," a musical about a mother with doomed sons, in London's West End, so she had the stage experience and vocal chops.

But her first viewing of "Boulevard" left Clark "impressed but not very moved. My eye kept going toward the set; I kept trying to figure out how it worked. (At one point, Norma's mansion flies into the air, and a party scene slides forward beneath it.) I thought it would be hard to make the part emotionally engaging, and I like to be moved when I go to the theater.

"Trevor gently but determinedly got his point over. The next thing I knew, I was rehearsing . . . (and) I grew to love the character. When the show closed, I took two souvenirs: Norma's spectacles and eyelashes. I wore them opening night on the tour." (She also wore her London costumes, taken in because she'd lost a few pounds.)

One Clark Web site quotes Rod McKuen calling her "just the best person in the whole world." So how does she connect with the abusive, imperious Norma?

"I think she's like Hamlet, who can be played by Olivier, Branagh or Mel Gibson: She can be scary, funny, pitiable or all of those. I asked Trevor what he felt I could bring to it, and he said vulnerability and humor. He didn't want me to see the (1950) movie, where Gloria Swanson made her grotesque.

"Norma's deluded, a spoiled and bad-mannered woman who lives in the past. She went straight from being a star as an adolescent to this strange, veneered person. There's a bit missing in the middle."

Clark could have followed the same road. She was singing on BBC radio shows at 10, entertaining troops in World War II Army camps at 11, appearing in British movies at 12. When she topped the U.S. charts in 1965 with "Downtown," Clark had already conquered British and French markets. At 32, she knew how to handle fame without flaming out. "When 'Downtown' hit, it happened quite by surprise, like everything else. I was living in Geneva (Switzerland) - or was it Paris, where was I living? - and I was on tour in French-speaking Canada.

"I kept getting calls from 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' My husband Claude (Wolff) would say, 'Oo ees zees Ed Soolivan? Wot does ee want?' It was great, but it wasn't coming from nowhere. I had a full life and was pretty experienced."

She revived her film career at the exact time the genre most suited to her - big-budget musicals - fell into the tar pits of history. She made "Finian's Rainbow" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," but the studios retired that genre by 1970. ("Camelot" and "Paint Your Wagon," which she didn't make, dealt the real death blows.)

"I don't think Warners wanted to make 'Finian,' but they had the property and Fred Astaire. They brought in this totally unknown director, Francis Coppola, and his assistant, George Lucas - two guys from San Francisco with lots of hair and motorbikes.

"We shot outdoor scenes at the beginning, and Francis took Fred and me off with a hand-held camera, which was unheard of. I think we sort of broke into some people's fields, which shocked Fred. Francis said, 'Fred, dance across this field.' Fred said, 'I don't dance across fields. You build me a field on the back lot, and I dance on that. This one is full of rabbit holes and cow dung!' And Francis kept saying, 'But it's real! It's real!' v "We were a motley group, but it felt wonderful: I adored Francis and Fred, and the three of us were like the Three Musketeers. We sang together: Francis loved to sing, because he's Italian. Fred used to get me to explain what The Beatles' lyrics were all about."

Then she dropped out of sight stateside, though she worked overseas. She starred as Maria in "The Sound of Music" in a 1981 West End revival, supposedly prompting the real Maria Von Trapp to call her performance definitive.

The stage project nearest to her heart was a musical set in West Virginia during Reconstruction, "Someone Like You." She starred and wrote the music and lyrics.

"I've always had a great emotional feeling for the Civil War," she says. "I went several times to West Virginia, which was kind of an in-between area between North and South, and really had the feeling I'd been there before. I used Negro spirituals and country music, all the elements in the mixing bowl that makes pop music.

"We did very well on tour, and then another producer took it over for the West End. He decided changes had to be made, and it was really taken away from me. West End audiences thought they would see 'Gone With the Wind'; they don't know about Reconstruction or the Underground Railroad. Because it was personal to me, it was quite hurtful. But you pick yourself up and go off on a concert tour."

She's creating one more personal project: a one-woman show covering her six-decade career.

"I'm working with one of the artistic directors of Cirque du Soleil. They're a very spiritual, very funny company. I don't think I'll be doing 'Downtown' swinging from a trapeze, but you never know!

"I'll go back to my childhood during the war, my French career, some of my movies. Michel Legrand wrote me a new song; I've written a poem about the theater. I'll (put in) my love of jazz, which has influenced me all my life. I'd want the show to be a true image of what's made me what I am."