Bionic woman's horse sense

CALABASAS, Calif. -- It took wild horses to get Lindsay Wagner to play a "really old and gnarly" woman in the Hallmark Channel movie "Thicker Than Water."

"I had to like swallow my pride," says Wagner, now 55 with two grown sons and still instantly recognizable as "The Bionic Woman" from the 1970s. "I went down, I think, from where I look naturally, but there was a lot of talk about what a hard life Jess had had and she was a lot older than her sister, so, to give a full contrast, I went for it."

She plays Jess Jarrett, a California rancher who struggles to protect the animals from unsympathetic neighbors -- a role that closely reflects her own passions about the preservation of nature.

The sister character is Natalie Jones, a Los Angeles lawyer with a very different lifestyle and values. She's played by Melissa Gilbert, 40, who was young Laura Ingalls in "Little House on the Prairie."

In case you hadn't noticed, Hallmark likes nostalgic casting.

"People know [Wagner's] name, whether from 'The Bionic Woman,' or commercials, or the movies she's done," says Al Dickerson, producer of the movie that airs 8 p.m. Saturday.

He says the casting fit because "like the woman she plays, Lindsay's very close to the earth, and has very strong feelings about these issues."

As an "emotionally inaccessible" child, Wagner took acting classes prescribed by a family friend. It was "something fun to do," but also helped heal her "hurting inside."

She received some job offers as a teenager but decided to wait. "I was off being a hippie." Then at 22, "I just woke up one day and said, 'It's time."'

After a small role on "Marcus Welby, M.D." as a nurse, Universal gave her a contract. She guest-starred in many of the studio-produced series, one of which was "The Six Million Dollar Man."

Introduced to boost ratings as a love interest for Lee Majors' Steve Austin, Wagner's Jaime Sommers was made bionic to give her life after a skydiving accident, but her body rejected the bionics and she died.

Fans were outraged. Letters flooded in, complaining that a potentially "quintessential female role model" had been killed off so arbitrarily.

So Universal sought to restore Sommers to cyborg life, first in another episode of "The Six Million Dollar Man," and then in her own "The Bionic Woman" series.

"They started chasing me -- which is wonderful," recalls Wagner, who had opted out of her Universal contract to pursue feature work. "Eventually I said, 'Hey, why not.' I was doing acting therapy with kids at the time and I realized this way I can talk to millions of kids."