TV REVIEW : Diana Ross in ‘Darkness’ Spotlight : Her impressive acting in ABC’s ‘Out of Darkness’ on Sunday is a shattering portrait of a woman beset by ‘voices and demons.’

Diana Ross, essentially forgotten as an actress, has re-emerged after a shockingly long, self-imposed 16-year absence from the movies.

And what a considerable return it is. “Out of Darkness” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) is Ross’ shattering portrait of a woman’s battle with paranoia/schizophrenia, experienced even in her better moments as “voices and demons.”

The pop diva image is nowhere to be seen. Instead Ross galvanizes essentially every scene in a performance so impressively controlled and cliche-free that Ross must rank as Hollywood’s best-kept acting secret.

It seems her acting debut 22 years ago in “Lady Sings the Blues,” for which she deserved but lost the Oscar to Liza Minnelli (for “Cabaret”), was no fluke after all. But after her steep nose dive with “Mahogany” (1975) and a so-so attempt to reignite her screen career with “The Wiz” (1978), Ross dropped out of the acting business like a falling comet.

True, special scripts were hard to come by and Ross did recently get “scooped” (her own description) trying to lift a Josephine Baker project off the ground, but 16 years?

Out of darkness, indeed.

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Anyway, Ross, in her dramatic TV debut, has reinvented herself in a performance certain to recharge her acting career. And as co-executive producer, she helped flap together a distinguished production, beginning with the richly observant, well-researched screenplay by Barbara Turner and the expressive direction of Larry Elikann.

As Norma Desmond might say, Ross does bring a face to the screen. But only slowly do the feverish eyes and hard edges melt away following the last-ditch recourse of a psychiatrist (Lindsey Crouse) to free her with an experimental drug called clozapine.

When we meet Ross’ deteriorating Paulie Cooper, she’s in mad repose, staring through her bedroom window. She’s 42, a onetime promising medical student and flower of everyone’s eye whose life stopped at 25 and who’s been in and out of mental hospitals for 17 years. We never sense the real source of Paulie’s illness, except once when she self-mockingly describes herself as “my father’s son,” a curdling line.

The camera glides over Paulie’s physical world, a wonderful old California Craftsman-style house on a peaceful block in L.A. and a protective, loving, expanded family that is helpless and even caged in its love: Paulie’s vigorous mother (Ann Weldon), her endearing grandmother (Beah Richards), her wary, bright 10-year-old daughter (Chasiti Hampton) and her simmering sibling rival of a sister (Rhonda Stubbins White).

In “Out of Darkness,” glamour takes a big holiday. But Ross doesn’t need a stylish performance number to lean back on--unlike her previous three movies and Ross’ future ABC movie about the true-life Nazi concentration camp ordeal of little-known American jazz singer Valaida Snow (which was recently produced as a play in Studio City).

For the first half of the movie, Ross’ stringy hair, puffy eyes and alternately glazed and fierce demeanor create evocative imprints. The dialogue is frequently jolting. “I’m a slut and I’m rotting inside,” Paulie tells her mother. Later she tells a shrink that “my brain’s been stolen, and it’s going to the master machine that collects all brains.” Later comes a sudden, blunt self-portrait: “I’m black and I’m getting blacker in here” (a psychiatric center).

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Caroming between stays at home and psychiatric live-in centers (where team therapy sessions catch some of the flavor of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), Ross rips apart a bathroom shower, sheds her clothes and cowers naked in the rain in a public street, and, subtle cruelty cracking the corners of her mouth, pours poison into her sister’s soda pop.

As fear rules the deceptive warmth inside the house, her mom, the larger-than-life Weldon, bars her bedroom door at night and remarks of her daughter: “She has a terminal illness but never dies.”

The material, which could have been so bloody predictable, is kept surging by not only Ross and a fine cast (especially check out Juanita Jennings’ vibrant health specialist) but also by the movie’s episodic blackouts, which enhance the action and the rhythm.

But even Paulie’s return to health is sobering. Emblematic is a failed romantic encounter with an eligible bachelor too good to be true (Carl Lumbly) and a quietly numbing fade-out--the perfect way to end this story.