Hello, Polly!

In 2001, after a lifetime of performing in movies, on TV, on Broadway, in concerts and on recordings, the then-70-year-old Polly Bergen decided to pack it in.

“I just wanted to totally quit,” she says.

And quitting meant buying a house in the country where she could sit back in a garden and watch the grass grow.

“I’d been living on the East Side of Manhattan,” Bergen says, “but I went up to Southbury, Conn., for a weekend of home shopping. I fell in love with the first house I saw. But I couldn’t just buy the first house, so I looked for the entire weekend. And at the end of the weekend, I bought the first home I saw.”

Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance

Actress Polly Bergen

Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance

BERGEN COUNTY: Bergen fell in love with this 1760 former mill house in Connecticut; she decorated it herself, filling rooms, including the master bedroom, with antiques.

Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance

Polly Bergen's master bedroom

It’s a 1760 former mill house (where farmers once ground wheat and corn) that sits on 9½ acres with two waterfalls, two water holes for swimming and a 1700s “rain house.” (That’s where swimmers, caught in sudden storms, ducked in for shelter.)

The main house originally measured 1,600 square feet, but in 2008, Bergen added an extension for another 850 square feet. The new part of the house consists of the master bedroom (with a vaulted ceiling 20 feet high and a hand-carved stone fireplace), a bathroom, an office, a dressing room and one room that was built specifically to be her closet.

“The secret I’ve lived by ever since I started earning money is this: Always buy a house with an extra bedroom adjoining the master,” Bergen says. “And that’s always my closet.”

In total, the home has three bedrooms and 2½ bathrooms, plus a dining room, two offices (one for Bergen, one for her assistant), a dressing room and a patio.

And it boasts many beautiful original details: hardwood floors, old-fashioned windows (with eight different squares of glass and wood separating the panes) and aged wood beams on the ceilings. But the original accents can also be rather peculiar: In the dining room, an entire wall — with a working fireplace — leans precariously downward like a little cousin of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Another problem with the house is that Bergen hasn’t had much time to enjoy it. “I wasn’t here quite a week when I got my first job offer,” she says. “And I haven’t stopped working since.”

First, there was Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on Broadway in 2001, for which she received a Tony nomination. After that came guest parts on “The Sopranos” and “Desperate Housewives” (for the latter, she got both an Emmy nomination and Larry Hagman as a love interest). There was “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks” on Broadway, a starring role in the made-for-TV movie “Candles on Bay Street” and cabaret performances at Feinstein’s. She also filmed a recent pilot for CBS, and she’s about to make an independent movie called “Struck by Lightning” that Chris Colfer of “Glee” wrote (creating a part just for Bergen) and will star in.

“I could work 24 hours a day if I wanted to,” Bergen says. “I think what I realized is that I’m happiest when I’m working.”

In between all those jobs, Bergen had to sandwich in time to decorate her house, for which she did all the designing herself. “At the age of 80, I’ve done enough homes to know what I like,” she says.

And she knows rare, fabulous antiques. Like the magnificent mid-1700s hand-carved clock by Grinling Gibbons. It depicts Mother and Father Time and not only still has its original works, but also chimes on the hour.

Another treasure is a wood carving of two horses that was an old English stable sign, likely dating from the late 1700s.

There’s also her Emmy, for her performance in “The Helen Morgan Story” on “Playhouse 90” in 1957. And right above the Emmy is a framed front page of the Los Angeles Times, where the main headline reads: “Polly Bergen Top Emmy Winner.”

Now, with all her things in place, Bergen says she’s truly content with her life.

“I came to Southbury because I wanted to live a more simple life,” she says. “When I was a child, I saw lots of movies about happy people living in Connecticut. And ever since then, that was where I wanted to live. I thought it would be like the movies. And it really is. It’s exactly what I hoped it would be.”

Polly Bergen’s favorite things

* Her poodle, Chelsea

* A signed Andy Warhol poster, a gift from the artist

* The four Al Hirschfelds: one for the movie “The Caretakers,” two for “The Helen Morgan Story” and one for “Follies”

* The poster from “Follies” that reads “Polly Bergen is triumphant”; it was stolen by the crew and tucked into the back of her car

* Her Emmy

* The hand-carved Grinling Gibbons clock