She’s Got a Big Fan

Steven Spielberg is such a fan of ABC’s “China Beach” (Wednesdays, 10 p.m., KABC), he asked Marg Helgenberger, who plays the cynical hooker K.C. on the series, to be in his new film, “Always.”

“I was nervous about going in and meeting him,” says the 31-year-old actress. “I had this little speech prepared about how much I loved his movies. Then I walked into his room and he said, ‘I’m a big fan of yours.’ ”

Helgenberger, who hails from the farming community of North Bend, Neb., plays an airplane mechanic in Spielberg’s fantasy based on the 1943 classic “A Guy Named Joe.”

“She’s pretty open and a bit of a tomboy,” says Helgenberger of her character.

And what was it like to be directed by Spielberg?

“He lets you find your own way through the character,” she says. “His imagination works overtime. He loves what he does.”

Helgenberger, a graduate of Northwestern University, loves working on “China Beach.” But, she says: “It’s a killer show. It’s legendary because it kills the crew, it kills the actors--it kills everybody involved.”

It takes eight days to shoot each episode of the Vietnam War drama. Most work days last a grueling 15 hours. “Being on location in Valencia when it gets down to 30 degrees at night and having to shoot in the rain--that’s very taxing on your well-being.”

Still, says Helgenberger, she would rather suffer those hardships than “sit in a studio from 9 to 5 working on a sitcom that I didn’t want to do.”

Helgenberger recently married actor Alan Rosenberg, whom she met in New York while appearing on the ABC soap “Ryan’s Hope.”

“I just was back home over Thanksgiving because I got married,” she says. “My mother threw a little bash for us at the North Bend Auditorium. It was really cute. It was a big deal for the town.”