Director Paul Mazursky loves women. At home he has had the same leading lady for 37 years. He dotes on his two daughters and two granddaughters. He even played a woman—the mother of Richard Dreyfuss's bumbling dictator in his 1988 film Moon over Parador. This affinity for the fairer sex has paid off: Monday, Lena Olin and Anjelica Huston, who star in his latest movie, Enemies, A Love Story, will fidget among the five nominees for this year's Best Supporting Actress Oscar. "I've been around more women than men on a very close, personal level," says Mazursky, 59. "I've got men friends too. But women tend to be more emotional. I respond to that."

That empathy is key to the success of Enemies, an adaptation of the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer for which Mazursky and his co-writer, Roger Simon, also received an Oscar nomination. "Singer wrote about three fascinating women, each completely different" says Mazursky. "My job was to put flesh on them."

And what lovely flesh it is. Rounding out the trio who play Herman Broder's (Ron Silver's) three wives in the story about Holocaust survivors in postwar New York City is Polish actress Margaret Sophie Stein. "I found three interesting women," says Mazursky. "Anjelica's got a lot of contradictions. She appears to have great strength, and suddenly she's very vulnerable. So she was a wonderful choice for Tamara [Herman's prewar wife who he thought had died]." Stein, who plays Yadwiga, the dimwitted servant Herman married out of gratitude for hiding him from the Nazis, "is very bright and funny," says Mazursky. "Not like the woman she plays." And of Olin, cast as Masha, Herman's psychologically battered third wife, he says, "Lena is a woman who is abundantly sensual without trying. She has a staggering sexuality."

"Paul has a sense of what's inside a woman, what is waiting to explode, and he brings it out in your performance," says Stein. "I once asked him what he'd like to come back as in another life, and he said, 'I'd like to be a woman. I'd like to give birth to a child.' I think that's wonderful."

At first, Mazursky says, he was concerned that he would have difficulty reproducing postwar Brooklyn for Enemies. "But suddenly I realized I was making a movie of a time I lived [in Brownsville], and I started remembering all kinds of things." One of those memories is of skipping school and going to double features with his homemaking mother, Jean, while his father, David, worked as a laborer.

Those afternoons in the dark fed a fascination with movies that would lead him to direct 12 of his own, most often focusing on marital trials and triumphs. "Blume in Love [1973] is about marriage. An Unmarried Woman [1978] is about marriage," he says. "Down and Out in Beverly Hills [1985] and Alex in Wonderland [1970] were about marriage." And to make his female characters believable, Mazursky looks no further than his own breakfast nook. "In Alex in Wonderland, Ellen Burstyn's character was based very much on me," says Betsy, 61, who met Mazursky at the fountain in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park in 1952 and married him a year later. "There were also characteristics of Susan Anspach in Blume in Love, quite a lot of them. It was kind of a shock at first when I would hear things I had said repeated in his movies," she adds. "But now I'm used to it."

For Enemies, Betsy, who works with Holocaust survivors at a Jewish social services agency, arranged for Paul and Huston to meet with several of her clients. When Mazursky later showed them the film, she says, "they were very moved," adding that she admires his ability to portray the common man. "He's interested in everyone. If we go to a gas station, he'll get into a deep conversation with an attendant."

Better an attendant than a movie star. "I enjoy meeting extraordinary people," he explains, "but most of the people I like—the people I play tennis or poker with—are not extraordinary." Such simple tastes underline a marriage that has defied the Hollywood odds. "Betsy's not impressed by fame. We both come from poor backgrounds," he says. "We know how much sham there is in the whole thing."

Mazursky's reeling eye, though, can be tough on his family. Not only Betsy but daughters Meg, 31, and Jill, 24, have seen their actions replayed on the screen. Meg, a former casting director, admits that the anorexic daughter in Down and Out in Beverly Hills bears an uncomfortable resemblance to her college-age self. The bratty 13-year-old in The Tempest was based on Jill, who is getting into the family business: Filofax, a movie she co-wrote, will be released by Disney this summer.

In June, Mazursky starts his own next movie. The subject? What else: marriage. Called Scenes from a Mall, it will star Woody Allen—in his first major role in a film he didn't direct since The Front in 1976—and Bette Midler as husband and wife. Betsy Mazursky can hardly wait to hear what comes out of Bette's mouth.

—Mary H.J. Farrell, Doris Bacon in Los Angeles