The Prime of Miss Jean Smart Doesn’t Lack for Variety : Television: The actress best known as Charlene on ‘Designing Women’ has since made a career of shining in a wide range of roles.

The woman of a thousand faces swung open the door of her sun-dappled Encino home. It appeared to be Jean Smart, all right--blond, 5-foot-10, bright smile that reminded you of some dairy queen on the cover of an outdoor magazine.

But if you’ve followed Smart’s blinding array of TV movie personas, you can never be sure who the real Jean Smart is.

In an industry where most stars’ personalities are frozen in place, changing little from movie to movie, Smart, at 41, stands as one of the most chameleonic actors in television.

In almost rat-a-tat-tat order over the past few years, Smart has portrayed a stern, laconic Florida swamp farmer (“The Yearling”); a heartbreakingly lovable borderline-retarded mother of six kids she nearly loses to the courts (“The Yarn Princess”); a small-town teacher who has a giddy romance with a rock star (“Just My Imagination”), and a twisted killer in “Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story.”

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In fact, her portrayal in this movie (based on a real case) ranks among her best. She assumes a tough, glazed pallor to play the prostitute who killed seven Johns she flagged down along backwater Florida roads.

“Jean is the best actress I’ve worked with in 10 years,” says Peter Levin, the director of “Overkill.” “She has tremendous emotional power. She’s a dangerous actor because she’s unpredictable.”

And now she’s making a return to theater, where she got her start, and the big screen. She will co-star with Mary Steenburgen in “Marvin’s Room,” a dark comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family, at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood in September. After some hesitation about returning to comedy, she has agreed to co-star as a drunken neighbor who’s continually coming on to the eldest Brady boy in Paramount’s big-screen version of “The Brady Bunch,” which starts shooting in L.A. this summer under the direction of Betty Thomas for Alan Ladd Jr. and Sherry Lansing.

Not bad for an actress who was so worried about being typecast that she walked away from a fat paycheck on “Designing Women” while the series was still going strong. She doesn’t regret doing the series, but five years of playing sweet but slow Charlene were enough.

“I can’t pretend it’s not the most visible thing I’ve done,” Smart said. “I know networks wouldn’t have offered me so much if I hadn’t been on a hit show. But I didn’t become an actor to get rich. I knew it was time to go.”

She made a brief sortie back to the stage (“Laughing Wild” at the Tiffany), appeared in a little-seen but critically popular movie satirizing Hollywood wanna-bes (“Mistress”), then discovered a mother lode in TV movies.

“She’s one of America’s truly hidden talents. There’s a light inside of her that can shine in all sorts of patterns,” said Tom McLoughlin, who directed her in last spring’s “The Yarn Princess” for ABC.

As she sat in her living room wearing a long, loose white sweater and faded jeans, Smart occasionally played with her family’s latest addition--Max, an 8-week-old puppy who’s half golden retriever, half black Labrador. She had put up a little wire mesh fence for the dog in the corner of the family playroom that was otherwise scattered with toys belonging to her 4 1/2-year-old son, Connor. Smart is married to actor Richard Gilliland, whom she met on the “Designing Women” set.

So how did Smart segue from playing a monster killer to a borderline retarded mother of six?

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The question doesn’t faze her, but she appears a bit puzzled by it. “Actors are supposed to be different people,” she answers matter-of-factly. “That’s what they taught us in drama school.

“My big influences,” she continues, “were teachers--Eve Roberts, who was my first drama coach at the University of Washington and who now teaches drama at USC. She expected us to act professional, and she hated theater games like ‘Now you’re going to lie on the floor, twitter your arms and tell me about yourself.’

“My other big inspiration was my high school teacher in Seattle. I was a cheerleader, but then I ran into Earl Kelly’s acting class. He was tough, and I became smitten with theater.”

After college, Smart hit the regional theater trail--the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore., and theaters in Seattle, Atlanta, Alaska and Connecticut, where she played the classics. She landed in New York in late 1980, where she made something of a name for herself playing a lesbian intellectual in “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove,” an Off Broadway eye-opener for the time.

That landed her an agent, which led to a role on Broadway in “Piaf,” which led to Hollywood. Here she reprised her “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove” role at the Fountain and the Cast theaters in 1983.

“There’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Oh, why didn’t I go to Hollywood when I was 22?’ ” she said. “Instead I did Shakespeare in the rain in Oregon. In reality, I can’t stay away from theater. It’s where you learn diversity and to use your whole body. In movies you do things from the neck up.”

Many who work with Smart are baffled as to why she hasn’t attracted more attention from major film producers. She wonders too.

“It’s actor’s paranoia,” Smart said. “I don’t want it to be a problem. I’ve always been a late bloomer. Also, there seems to be less work in features because the budgets are so big. By comparison, people forget that as far as exposure and recognition go, a network movie is virtually seen only one time. It’s a one-shot thing for an actor.

“But you have to understand that I didn’t expect people to see me in ‘Designing Women’ and say, ‘Let’s put her in “Out of Africa, Part II.” ’ “

She paused and added: “If I were 25, there would probably be more work.”

So she’s keeping busy elsewhere, with theater--”My husband and I have optioned an unproduced play from Kelly Masterson, ‘Into the Light,’ an extraordinary play that’s a cross between ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and ‘Equus’ “--and television.

She just finished shooting the eight-hour miniseries “Scarlett,” a sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” which will air on CBS in November. In it she plays an “outspoken, cigar-smoking” Charleston woman who is Rhett Butler’s best friend, a character minted for the sequel. She gets to “doll up” and appears (with Timothy Dalton as Rhett and Joanne WhalleyKilmer as Scarlett O’Hara) in three of the four installments.

“ ‘Scarlett’ was a great deal of fun,” she said. “I wanted to play someone who was lighthearted. I don’t know what a shrink would say, but when you shoot a scene and get it right--God, it feels great.”