You Know David Morse . . . or Do You?

Sometimes they think he's their old high school track coach.

Almost every time David Morse walks into a supermarket, someone will want to chat. They look once, then again and finally approach.

He tries to be friendly, even when they're a thousand points off in the identity department.

That's the price of being a highly successful character actor -- you're a face, not a name. Gauzily recognizable, instantly familiar, but not always, unequivocally known.

So they think Morse is their old track coach, or maybe that neighbor who keeps dismembered body parts from the women he has murdered stuffed in heating vents around his suburban home.

Well, they might not think that, exactly, at least until they see "Disturbia" (see review on Page 34), a new teen thriller that has the icy-voiced, hollow-eyed actor doing one of the things he does best: play creepy.

So they approach, thinking he is one guy or another, and inevitably say they don't remember him being so tall.

"They all go through the process of 'No, no, no. That's not him. He's short on TV.' Or they can't believe someone like me is in a grocery store," says Morse, who is 6 feet 4 inches tall and does all the cooking (and thus shopping) for his family whenever he's home. So when he's standing in line and the approach is made, he smiles and proceeds with the chat, regardless of how far they missed the mark with his, um, name. "One of the things I've found is that the more you behave like a human being, the more you're treated like a human being."

And in Philadelphia, where we reach Morse by phone and where he has lived for the past 13 years, if the folks in the store get it wrong, he'll help them out. Mention that they might know him from his years as a single-dad doctor on "St. Elsewhere." Or from those couple of years when he played the leading man -- a cop-turned-cabbie -- on the CBS drama "Hack."

Or one of the dozens of other characters who have borne his face in the past 3 1/2 decades. Which is not such a bad record for a boy from Massachusetts who wasn't quite on the fast track after high school.

"I was working at a newspaper press, and that probably was going to be my life," he says. "I was in the pressroom, just bundling newspapers there. Making my $3 an hour."

But also doing community theater, including one production that led to a tryout for the Boston Repertory Theatre. He landed a spot with the now-defunct theater, stayed six years in the 1970s, which led to a stint in New York and eventually the siren call to move to Los Angeles.