Shelly Cole and John Ratzenberger star in The Village Barbershop, about a barbershop owner whose life is falling apart. It will be shown tomorrow night as part of the 2008 Rhode Island International Film Festival.

John Ratzenberger.

His name might not be familiar at first. But Ratzenberger can’t walk down any street in the United States without someone recognizing him as Cliff, the know-it-all mailman who sat at the bar where everyone knows your name for 11 years on the hit TV series Cheers.

Tonight starting at 7 he’ll emcee the opening of the 12th Rhode Island International Film Festival at the Providence Performing Arts Center.

Twenty-four hours later at the Columbus Theatre he will present his most recent film, writer-director Chris Ford’s independently produced The Village Barbershop in which Ratzenberger plays a man haunted by the past and in danger of losing his barber shop until a pretty drifter comes into his life.

Ratzenberger was on the phone last week from his home north of Los Angeles where he admitted that it’s not that easy going from a bar where everyone knows your name to the world at large, where everyone knows who you are when they see your face. That’s why, he said, he spends a lot of time sailing his boat, often along the East Coast. “I grew up in Connecticut,” said the 61-year-old Bridgeport native, “so at every opportunity I go back there to visit friends,” adding that “you can take the boy out of New England, but you can’t take New England out of the boy.” In fact, he said his boat “is parked not too far from Newport.”

He’s proud of The Village Barbershop, which is set in Reno with its glittering casinos, although the shop itself was actually in downtown Napa, Calif. The film recently won the Audience Choice Award at the Cinequest Festival in San Jose, Calif., as well as a best actress award for co-star Shelly Cole and has gotten good reviews elsewhere as well.

He liked the plot “because it’s a real-life story. It’s a small story. It’s not about car crashes and multimillion-dollar sets. But it’s a story about everyday heroism.” He plays Art, a man whose life is adrift, “but then, as sometimes happens, an angel flies in to give him a kick in the pants.

“It’s a film about personal responsibilities; that you can’t blame other people for where you are in life.

“It’s about taking responsibility for your life.”

He said The Village Barbershop “is that movie that people are complaining Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.”

Ratzenberger’s career, post-Cheers, has been one of constant activity, both in front of the camera on TV shows and behind it, directing them. He even enjoyed a run on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars in the spring of 2007.

Despite the fact that many people might not recognize his name, Ratzenberger has become something of a good-luck mascot for Pixar Studios, having appeared in every one of their feature films, beginning with 1995’s Toy Story and continuing right through to the currently-in-theaters WALLE, in which he plays a human, and the currently-in-production Toy Story 3, where for the third time he is Hamm, the piggy bank.

Because of his work on the Pixar films and his live-action roles in Superman and The Empire Strikes Back, where he was a major in the rebel air force — and has his own action figure to prove it — Ratzenberger said he recently discovered that he is “Number 3 on the list of actors who’ve been in the biggest moneymaking films of all time.”

And how did he become the Pixar mascot?

He dates it back to the first Toy Story when Pixar was a company no one had heard of and was working out of a warehouse on the outskirts of San Francisco. “I think,” he said with a laugh, “it might be because afterwards I hung around and they let me help load their equipment in the rental van.”