FORT WORTH, Texas — Bill Paxton is grinning from ear to ear — and for good reason. Fort Worth's most celebrated contemporary actor is in the middle of Bill Paxton Day, his hometown's full-blown tribute to the performer. Along with the accolades, Paxton is to receive the key to the city, a lifetime achievement award from the Lone Star Film Society and the chance to screen his latest directorial effort, the golf story "The Greatest Game Ever Played."

But catch up with Paxton, 50, on this unusually mild January afternoon and he's wearing a smile of nostalgia for his Fort Worth youth. Strolling the familiar emerald fairways of the city's Shady Oaks Country Club, Paxton is reminded of those endless summer days when, as a 10-year-old, he spent hours ambling all over the course and hiding under the 18th hole bridge from the stern-faced members of the ritzy golf mecca.

"This course was our Camelot, my playground," says Paxton, taking off his Chanel sunglasses and inhaling the scene. "I was never an avid golfer, but, God, there wasn't a day I wasn't out on the course with my dog, hunting golf balls or finding some kind of mischief to get into."

Continuing his reminiscence-filled tour, Paxton stops in the clubhouse and stares at the Ben Hogan memorabilia in faux-museum glass cases. Paxton, an affable spinner of a good yarn, recalls being an impressionable kid, shagging balls for the golf legend for whom Shady Oaks was a second home.

"Of course," recalls Paxton. "I was very intimidated by Hogan. Someone once asked Hogan if he ever felt lucky. And his answer: 'You know, I do feel lucky. The more I practice the luckier I get."'

Adjust that Hogan slogan so that it comes out, "The more I work, the luckier I get," and you have the credo for Bill Paxton's career. He left Fort Worth for Los Angeles in 1974, at 18, and hasn't looked back. Over the course of 30 years and 60-odd movies, Paxton has curated a character gallery as wide-ranging as a Texas prairie. He's cornered the market on tic-filled eccentrics, Type-A strivers and, most poignantly, the everyman caught in a vice between virtue and venality.

But for his entire storehouse of big-screen characters, Paxton has never created and nurtured one over the course of a TV series. Nor has he ever established himself as a romantic leading man.

Until now. Debuting tomorrow is HBO's "Big Love," in which Paxton plays Bill Henrickson, an upright, fortysomething business and family man. Actually, he's a three-family man — a member of a Mormon Church offshoot that condones polygamy. The result: three wives and seven kids.

But all the logistics and sexual gymnastics involved in three interlocking families aside, "Big Love" is most concerned with how Henrickson juggles the emotional and physical needs of his career, demanding spouses and expanding brood.

No one more than Paxton understands that embedded in the complexity of "Love" is a very "Big" opportunity.

"I have this weird feeling," he says in the husky voice of someone fighting an oncoming cold, "that this might be the part of a lifetime."

But before Paxton could leap into "Big Love," he had to shed that cliched screen actor's bias against the tube.

"I definitely had a stigma about television," says Paxton. "Though I rarely want for movie work, in recent years I hadn't seen a great role in a movie like what this HBO series was offering. The truth is that any prominent film actor would have jumped at this role, and I was, frankly, lucky to get in early."

For his part, Paxton thought it was crucial to approach "Big Love's" potentially creepy material in a nonsensational way. As the patriarchal nucleus of the show, Paxton's Henrickson could have been played any number of ways, including high camp.

But Paxton never takes the character less than seriously, playing him as an entrepreneur and aspiring home-improvement-store mogul struggling to manage three very different marriages and adjoining households in the 'burbs of Salt Lake City. In many ways, Paxton's character and his three families are a poignant if perverse metaphor for the increasingly difficult challenge facing anyone who strives to be a giving husband, concerned parent and upstanding member of the community.

"Here is this guy trying to juggle his marriage and family — and it's just times three," says Paxton. "This show came up with this — no pun intended — mother lode of an idea as a way of looking at contemporary marriage and family through the prism of polygamy."

Given the queasiness of "Love's" story, it was vital the lead be as likeable as possible. Paxton was a perfect fit because he comes across as so endearingly normal — even when in the company of multiple wives and popping Viagra like Good & Plenty.

Though he steeped himself in "Big Love's" jarring world of polygamy, Paxton found great universality in many of the series' themes.

"I was honestly surprised," says Paxton, "I think the real message of this series is tolerance. 'Big Love' is this looking glass into contemporary society and how three women and myself are trying to figure our way through this life."

"And, another thing," he adds. "While I don't think I'd have the physical stamina to handle three marriages, I'd like to think I have enough of a heart to handle them."