Janine Turner: She’s Quick on the Drawl

Janine Turner, who plays pilot Maggie O’Connell on CBS’ “Northern Exposure,” has already had a broken engagement to Alec Baldwin and a liaison with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Who’ll be next?

“Well, I saw a cute cowboy at the rodeo in Texas last week,” jokes the 28-year-old Lone Star State native and ex-Wilhemina

model. The drawl she hides on TV comes through strongly. “I’ve tried actors, why not go for cowboys?”

She hints at who will be the next grand love in her TV character Maggie’s life. “Did you see? Maggie and Joel kissed. Oooee!” the actress says with a squeal. Joel Fleischman is the show’s eligible New York doctor practicing in Cicely, Alaska.

But Maggie already has a boyfriend, Rick. “I think she’s more passionate about Joel than Rick, though. This woman can be with a man she isn’t really crazy about just for the company. That’s a very manly quality--I could never do that.

“I attach. I get emotionally intertwined with the men I love.”

She talks about the men in her life openly. On Baryshnikov: “He’s been a very important person in my life. He has such a sense of depth.”

As for Baldwin, she says the two still keep in touch: “We have a bond.”

Although she wants the “classic great husband and two kids,” for now she is content to concentrate on her work. She splits her time among New York, Los Angeles, Texas and Seattle. She had a tiny role in “Steel Magnolias” and is awaiting release of “The Ambulance,” a movie she made with James Earl Jones.

“I was at my wits’ end before Maggie came along,” Turner says, “very depressed and out of money.”

Yet not desperate enough to go back to soaps. Her first TV part was as empty-headed Laura Templeton on “General Hospital.” “I was through with playing the damsel in distress.”