...His career momentum continued until three years ago, when he was just finishing the attention-getting role of Joe Gillis opposite Patti LuPone's Norma Desmond in the London production of "Sunset Boulevard." They were scheduled to move to Broadway with the show when its producer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, abruptly dropped LuPone in favor of Glenn Close. Anderson took that as his cue to leave the cast, having become soured on the industry and its trappings.

"At that point I had serious doubts about being an actor," he says. "I got tired of all the lying. What really prompted me to take this [cross-country] trip was, I realized I had all this machinery in my life: agents, lawyers. I felt I needed this."

He had been about three months into the trip at the time of the accident. For a month, he recovered at his childhood home in Gurnee, once again living with his mother, a former court reporter now retired. Three months later, Anderson moved back to Los Angeles, living in a hotel before finally renting a place in Malibu with his longtime girlfriend, British actress Dawn Spence.

Anderson still expresses wonder, even surprise, at his life and career, and friends say that the accident made him more philosophic. "It seems to me what I saw in Kevin after the accident was that something woke up in him," Sinise says. "He started looking at things differently than he might have in the past."

"After an accident like that, what is great is you realize things can't get much worse," Anderson says. "I look back on it and go, 'Well, if I can get through that, I can get through anything.'" It is this attitude Anderson applies to the controversy surrounding Nothing Sacred.

"Loyal Catholics are made to look like Neanderthals, and dissenting Catholics are the good guys," says William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League, about the show. "We try to present a more universal message, and this guy just happens to be a Catholic priest," Anderson counters, citing positive reviews of the series in the Jesuit magazine America. "We are not saying this is the way the Catholic Church is everywhere. We are just telling the story about this one particularly radical priest in a city parish. And these things are believable."

Believable -- and provocative. Upcoming topics include a fellow parish priest developing AIDS. Although it was shot last August, it has not been given an airdate. "There is an anxiety level," producer Manson admits, "but we have been assured it will run." Anderson defends such storylines, saying, "These are things that are happening today."

Both producer and star are completely aware that the attention Nothing Sacred is earning has both negative and positive aspects. As with ABC's early '90s hot potato, NYPDBlue, controversy can turn to success. "If the show picks up an audience, you will be shocked at how [the advertisers] will come back," asserts Manson.

Anderson takes a personal perspective on the battle over Nothing Sacred. "I didn't work for a while and couldn't [even] walk -- self-doubt starts to creep in," he says. "It takes a mammoth effort to rise above that.... That is part of the journey, and no one said it was going to be easy."