HARTFORD, Conn. — Richard Dreyfuss still has that giggle, that playful, slightly bad-boy laugh that has resonated in such iconic films as “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “American Graffiti” and in his Oscar-winning performance, “The Goodbye Girl.”

The laugh erupts many times during an after-rehearsal talk at Hartford’s TheaterWorks, where he is preparing to star in a new play, “Relativity,” by Mark St. Germain (”Freud’s Last Session”). Dreyfuss plays renowned physicist Albert Einstein. But if you think the three-person play is going to be a lighthearted encounter with Mr. Wizard, think again.

Richard Dreyfuss, seen here playing disgraced financier Bernie Madoff, will soon act the part of Albert Einstein in a three-person play at TheaterWorks in Hartford, Conn. Patrick Harbron/ABC via AP

St. Germain presents a dramatic speculation based on a little-known fact: In 1902, Albert and Mileva Einstein had a baby daughter, but after 1904, she was never seen or spoken of again. In the play, a young reporter confronts Einstein years later in Princeton, New Jersey, where the scientist must face his past.

Dreyfuss gazes at photographs of Einstein posted in the rehearsal room. “He had a twinkle,” says Dreyfuss, an autodidact with an insatiable interest in history and civics. “People liked him so much. He was ‘the scientist who wore the lederhosen.’ Nobody cared to make judgments about what they knew about his personal life.”

When Dreyfuss first read the script, he told St. Germain, “You’re not hard enough on him,” and as the play progressed through revisions, the character was toughened. Dreyfuss has long been fascinated with the scientist, even writing “An Einsteinian Vaudeville,” an unproduced film script, “because when I read the story of his life, I felt that different parts of his life lent themselves to different genres.”

Dreyfuss, who soon turns 69, has aged from boyish to avuncular, his glasses perched at the end of his nose, his mustache and balding hair a professorial snow white. But the questioning spirit of his hungry youth remains.

Though Dreyfuss is most known for his film and television roles (he recently played Bernie Madoff in a TV film), he also worked on Broadway and in Connecticut in “Requiem for a Heavyweight” at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and “All My Sons” at the Westport Country Playhouse.

“Acting has always thrilled me, but when you do something for so long, you’re allowed to take a break and I had been a film star since I was 25 years old. When the millennium happened, I kept saying to my friends, ‘How many times do you have to win in order to win?’ I realized I had a career and lost it and then regained it and then lost it and then regained it. I realized I was more comfortable on the hunt than having attained (success).”

That’s when he turned to testing his mettle again on Broadway, starring in “Sly Fox” in 2004, and to look at other challenges. When Mel Brooks asked him to do “The Producers” in London later that year, he saw it as an intriguing opportunity.

“But I told him, ‘I don’t know how to sing or dance.’ And he said, ‘Oh, who cares? You’re funny.’ Six days before the first preview they fired me because I didn’t sing or dance. That was a bad weekend. If it wasn’t for my son Ben being there I would have ..,” he says, his voice trailing off.

Since he planned on a six-month run in London, he decided to stay in England, where he was invited by Oxford to join the school as a senior associate member. That set him on a parallel path to pursue subjects that had always interested him, including politics, history and civics. In 2006 he created the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to reviving the teaching of civics in public schools.

Dreyfuss grew up in Queens, N.Y., until he was 9, when his family moved to Los Angeles, where he found his calling. He remembers being in his mother’s kitchen proclaiming, “I want to be an actor.”

“And she said, ‘Just don’t talk about it.’ So I went to the Jewish Community Center,” where he started performing in plays. His personality then, as now, was high-octane. (He’s publicly talked about his bipolar disorder.)

“Nothing held me back. I was absolutely determined. All I know is that before I (arrived in Los Angeles), I was a generic anybody, and then I became me.”

His first jobs were in a multitude of one-offs in television series in the ’60s and early ’70s: “Bewitched,” “The Big Valley,” “Gidget” and a bit part in “The Graduate.” Then came his breakout roles in 1973’s “American Graffiti,” 1974’s “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and 1975’s “Jaws.”

“I once called a friend whose son was running Universal (the movie studio that made “Jaws”) and I asked him to ask his son if he would give me the rights for such-and-such. My friend calls me back and he says, ‘Your name is (expletive).”‘

Some of that reputation is based on his checkered off-screen life with drugs in the early ’80s, but some of it, too, is rooted in his public objections to how the leading actors in “Jaws” were treated when the film went on to be the biggest moneymaker in film history. “The fact that they didn’t bonus any of us I find despicable. I did ‘American Graffiti’ for George Lucas, and in it were 10 major characters. Before there were any reviews, George took one of his 10 gross points and divided it up 10 ways. I’ve made more money off of that film than any back-end deal I ever had.”

He pauses and then says with a smile that is halfway between acceptance and pride, “I don’t have a very good reputation.”

Dreyfuss lives in San Diego with his third wife of 10 years, Svetlana Erokhin. He has two sons, Benjamin, 30, who works at Mother Jones, and Harry, 26, a director-writer, and a daughter, Emily, 33, who works at Wired. He says he doesn’t go to the movies anymore “so all the names of the people who win Oscars now are like fake names to me and so are the movies.”

He’s pursuing his own bliss by writing a book he’s not sure will be a novel or nonfiction. What was originally called “Appomattox, or If Only” is now titled “Two Virginians” and is about Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and “a Union general you’ve never heard of.” He also has an untitled civics book in the works that he’s writing with historians “that will be short and sweet. Most of all, I want people to understand it.”

Anything else? “I always wanted to teach a class about reviled heroes; men who did not deserve the bad reputations they have: Aaron Burr (he thought “Hamilton! The Musical” was “silly” and misrepresented Burr), Richard III, Huey Long …

“And Richard Dreyfuss?” it is suggested. He offers up one last giggle.

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