MASTERPIECE THEATRE TO AIR STORY OF 19th CENTURY SCANDAL

Trevor Eve says that when he was asked to play Charles Stewart Parnell he was only vaguelly aware of the 19th-century Irish politician whose love affair with a married woman scandalized the Roman Catholic country. Their passionate liaison and the downfall of the "uncrowned king of Ireland" os told in the four-part miniseries "Parnell and the Englishwoman." Francesca Annis also stars as his paramour and David Robb is her husband, Capt. Willie O'Shea. "I knew of the legend of Parnell and Katherine O'Shea, but I wasn't that familiar with their political involvement," says Eve, and English actor who divides his time between this country and England. "Parnell had an affair with a married woman for 12 years. He had children with her and passed them off as her husband's children. When it finally came out, pressure from the Roman Catholic Church terminated his political career," A protestant and an aristocrat with an American mother, Parnell had spearheaded the drive for home rule for Ireland in the Brithish Parliament. The issue of home rule was forgotten in the Irish public's outrage over his personal conduct, and the various Irish political factions he had brought together split. "He got along well with English politicians because of his aristocratic background," Eve says. "He was educated and spoke with an impeccable English accent. The Irish were scorned by the English. The English prime minister, William E. Gladstone, said he had no understanding of the man because he represented Ireland, yet had no irish accent." Gladstone had Parnell put on trial, jailed and ejected from Parliament for opposing repressive measures against Ireland. Later, they were forced into an uneasy alliance. "Before production, the cast spent about four weeks listening to historians lecture on Irish history so that we could have some understanding of what we were playing," Eve says. "It's incredibly complex. It's also very difficult when you deal with the private life of a public person. You try to have an understanding of what went on between him and Katherine O'Shea. "She wrote a book about it, but she's not exactly a heroine in Ireland. A lot of people feel it's a corruption of the truth. Parnell was described as a cold man, but he wrote the most extraordinary love letters filled with baby talk." Although much of the series takes place in Ireland, it was filmed in Liverpool, England. It was there that they found the period houses and buildings needed for historic authenticity. Eve has a home in the Venice section of Los Angeles which he shares with his wife, actres Sharon Maughan, and their children, Alice 9, and Jack, 6. The house is only a few blocks from the ocean, and a wooddecked patio overlooks one of the canals tha cut across Venice. Two rabbits are in a cage on the patio. "Those are the children's"," he says. "They named them Nureyev and Fonteyn. I'm very impressed that they named them after ballet stars. it could have been Fluffy and Snowy." Eve was last seen in this country in a two-part episode "Inspector Morse" on PBS' "Mystert!" he co-starred with Catherine Hicks in the ABC comedy pilot "Up To No Good," which was not picked up for the fall season. "I don't hold out much hope for it, but there's always a possibility," he says. "I play a con man who worms his way into a wealthy household on the East Coast and becomes emotionally involved with them." His only other American series was "Shadow Chaser" for ABC which had a very short run in 1985-1986 when it came up against "The Cosby Show." he played an anthropologist who teamed up with a tabloid reporter, played by Dennis Dugan, to chase after ghosts, zombies and other things that go bump in the night. He starred in an English series called "Shoestring" in 1980. "I left it after we'd done 21 hours," he says. "It was hugely popular, but I thought that was enough. When I came to this country and talked about series they talked about five years. That made me think about it. I had a ball making 'Shadow Chasers,' but it couldn't stand up against Bill Cosby." He also starred in such American TV movies as "The Corsican Brothers" and "Shadow on the Sun" and the miniseries "Lace" and Jamaica Inn." Trevor Eve is just back from appearing in "A Winter's Tale" in London. During the past year he also starred in a film version of "A Doll's House" as part of a series of plays for BBC. A film he made last March for the American Film Institute, "In the Name of the Father," had its premiere December 11. In it he plays a Crusader who develops a relationship with a young boy. "I'm preparing myself now to do another Shakespearan play next year," he says. "I'm reading the plays now for one of those huge roles, 'Macbeth' or 'Richard III.' They certainly take it out of you."