Cicely’s Good Sport : The Role of Maggie Came At a Time When Turner Really Needed It

They used to call women like Janine Turner a good sport: A woman who can coexist equally with men, yet retain her femininity. She’s physical but doesn’t wear boots to a dance. She’s smart but doesn’t talk about Kafka while drinking longneck beer.

Turner, in her short-cropped hairdo, seems just right as a woman who can carve out a life around the Arctic Circle, fix a leaky toilet, restore a man’s voice with a kiss, survive a lover’s death by falling satellite and still sparkle in the moonlight. For the uninitiated, that’s Maggie O’Connell, Turner’s character on “Northern Exposure,” Emmy’s newly ordained best drama, which opens its fourth season Monday.

Cicely, Alaska, the setting of “Exposure,” isn’t all there is for Turner. She recently returned from locations in Rome and the Italian Alps, where she played opposite Sylvester Stallone in his spring, 1993 action-adventure movie “Cliffhanger.” Turner plays a mountain rescue worker fighting a gang of murderous thieves.

“I’m pretty athletic and adventuresome,” she twangs forthrightly in the kind of accent you get when you’re raised around Fort Worth. “I grew up riding and running and swimming as well as dancing. Up in Seattle, where we make ‘Northern Exposure,’ I’ve got a Palomino quarter horse that I just ride and ride.”

Turner, 29, is an example of the benefits of perseverance. She survived early success, famous boyfriends, later rejection and abject poverty to become the leading light of the ‘90s’ quirkiest series. “It’s all a matter of remaining true to what you originally wanted to do,” she says. “Just hang in there.”

As a tomboy in Texas and daughter of an airline pilot, little Janine segued uncomfortably from beating the boys at track and basketball to winning beauty contests (she was Miss Texas La Petite). Dancing class was the logical next step. Work in amateur musical comedy led to modeling, then to acting, eventually to the big time. “I was in New York at 15,” modeling for Wilhelmina, she says.

In Los Angeles at 18, she worked in a nighttime soap (“Dallas”), a spoof of a soap (“Behind the Screen”) and an actual soap (“General Hospital”). At one point she auditioned for and didn’t win the leading lady part in Stallone’s “Staying Alive.”

“I decided about that time I didn’t want to be ‘Hollywood’ about anything. One thing I was sure I wouldn’t do was take my top off. I would have had to do that for ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High.’

“So I moved to New York. I needed more technique for acting. I needed to see the plays, to read the books, to educate myself, to become an artist.”

Her move wasn’t unanimously supported. “My agents fired me. I went from working in national commercials to pounding the streets hoping for regionals.” She came close to hocking the ring Alec Baldwin had given her. (Mikhail Baryshnikov was another New York boyfriend.)

Her previous connections were no help two years ago when she was running out of money. “I was thinking about letting go, about hanging it up, and that’s when ‘Northern Exposure’ happened.

“I had eight dollars left. I’d been working for 12 years and that’s what I had to show for it. I was wiped out. I knew every foot of every pavement in New York. I was so distraught that I said yes to a job in a soap. That same day I got the ‘Northern Exposure’ call. They say that luck is opportunity meeting preparedness, and I believe that’s true.”

Janine Turner the cockeyed optimist turned out to be the right casting for Maggie O’Connell. “I get a smile on my face when I think of her,” Turner says. “She’s open for anything. She’s determined and adventuresome. She’s more vulnerable than I am, and a little more neurotic.

“All her boyfriends end up dead. Things happen to her. Her mother comes by and burns her house down. She loves animals. In fact, she had an affair with a bear who became a man. That was our highest-rated show.”

“Northern Exposure” is Turner’s first job for which she feels no hidden shame. “It’s a show that people who don’t watch TV watch. Intellectually, people are refreshed. The show is the epitome of what I worked for since my first day in the business.

“Maggie doesn’t use her looks or sexuality to get anywhere in life. She gets by on her strength of personality and her intelligence. I read her and I went, ‘Yayyyy! Finally! A real character!’ ”

“Northern Exposure” airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on CBS.