ROSIE PEREZ / ACTRESS

After a year off, Rosie Perez is back starring in Nancy Savoca’s tale of pre- and postnatal stress, “The 24 Hour Woman.” It’s an apt title for former choreographer Perez, 34, who is tackling animation voicing for a DreamWorks project and doing her first screenwriting in addition to acting and running Ten in a Car Productions, which did the acclaimed cable series “Subway Stories.”

BABY TALK: “I’ve seen the ‘baby films.’ But when I read this script, I was, ‘Oh, this is different. This is scary!’ Usually someone has a baby, they crack up and then, like ‘Baby Boom,’ they become a millionaire selling baby food. Hey, that could happen. But to millions of Americans, I don’t think so. Slim to none, pal.”

REST CURE: “I’m really glad I took a year off after ‘Somebody to Love.’ That one hurt. They let it go straight to video. You really want people to see your work--like if I was a chef at Le Cirque and made the most gorgeous souffle, and no one comes to eat it.”

TYPECAST: “If someone sends me one more role for a ghetto chick from Brooklyn who’s pregnant--it’s insulting. In 10 years, I think I’ve done a diverse body of work and you can’t just see one or two movies of mine and then send me crap.”

ETHNIC UNCONSCIOUSNESS: “One [Latina] actress said to me, ‘I just did this thing, and you can’t tell I’m Latin.’ So being a success is losing all sense of identity? No wonder they don’t write good roles for us. That’s what’s great about ‘The 24 Hour Woman,’ a movie that happens to have Latins in it.”

DOMESTIC BLISS: “My fiance [writer-director Seth Zvi Rosenfeld] kicked me out of the editing room of his movie ‘King of the Jungle.’ Cliff Gorman is in it, and the little urban rat pack--Mickey Rapaport, Annabella Sciorra, myself. I play a lesbian pothead. Not a comedic role, but everyone laughed.”

CAREER MOVE: “I got hired by Tom Noonan to rewrite a script for Paramount. He called about me choreographing it. I met with him and said, ‘This [script] is horrible.’ He said, ‘What’s so horrible?’ I said, ‘I have these notes I made.’ Beautiful story of boys turning into men. I said, ‘I hope you hire the right person to rewrite it.’ He called my manager and said, ‘Rosie’s the person.’ ”

WORK DREAM: “I’m finishing an animated movie for DreamWorks, ‘El Dorado: City of Gold,’ coming out in 2000, with Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh. Jeffrey Katzenberg, what a man! A little dynamo.”