‘Jake’ Gives Anderson a New Facet in Her Constantly Evolving Career

In female Hollywood there’s cheesecake, there are comediennes and there are matriarchs.

Melody Anderson falls in there . . . somewhere. “Hollywood does want to put you in a drawer, either the lingerie drawer or the dirty-sock drawer,” Anderson says. “And I’ve done both.”

This month Anderson, who admits only that she is in her mid-30s, came out of the drawers to debut as a regular on CBS’ “Jake and the Fatman.” She plays police internal-affairs investigator Neely Capshaw.

Coming off several feature films, an art-appreciation and painting hiatus, and several months of writing, playing Capshaw is a new role for an actress who’s only constant is change.

Daughter of a Canadian professional football player, Canadian-born Anderson tried radio journalism in Australia but was turned off by that country’s bout with yellow journalism in the 1970s and, at the same time, was turned on by Hollywood. Her tenure here has so far seen her in the 1980 feature “Flash Gordon,” occasionally in NBC’s acclaimed but defunct “Hill Street Blues,” and in several television features that took her from playing Ernie Kovacs’ second wife to playing a Playboy centerfold model.

And then there’s writing and painting.

Anderson recently wrote a proposal for a one-hour series about Vietnam veterans that she’s trying to peddle to the networks (“The network executives’ faces get real long when I say it’s an hourlong drama,” Anderson said). Along with Steven Schachter, she also wrote a short feature called “Night Magic” that was released in 1988.

Six years ago, Anderson began painting to deal with the lulls between work. Now the hobby has taken her to art school and to cities around the world where she takes in the masters. Her own style of painting? Abstract, of course.