Linda Hamilton has gone a long way down the fame list from the early '90s, when she saved her son and the world, again, in "Terminator 2" and the MTV audience voted her "most attractive female" in the movies.
And, though it may cut into the celeb-a-ration treatment of her identical twin, a nurse, that's just terrific with Linda.
"It's completely OK," Hamilton said on the phone from her hotel room in New York, where she was prepping earlier this week for "Live with Regis and Kelly" and "The View," to plug her delightful little Sunday TV movie, "Bailey's Mistake," on "The Wonderful World of Disney" at 6 p.m.
"I think I could have gone on and nurtured that whole Terminatrix thing, but that's not what I wanted to be," she said. "Becoming an action-adventure star was not my plan. It's about playing all kinds of women, weak women, strong, quirky, troubled, normal I don't care."
Sunday, she plays a new Philadelphia widow who discovers that her husband spent all their money on some property on an island off the Maine coast. (Nova Scotia does a stunning stand-in for the state.)
To get the cash back, she needs to investigate. So she packs her two children into the Wagoneer and they head off to an adventure with a group of good-hearted but mysterious island folk.
Ghosts appear. The postman wears a skirt. The town drunk is a cat. That sort of thing. Joan Plowright and Kyle Secor costar, and a teen-ager named Paz de la Huerta is exquisite as Hamilton's troubled daughter.
Hamilton says she took "Bailey's Mistake" because it was an opportunity to combine the role of a grieving widow with lots of comedy, "like Greek drama." Plus it's made by her ex-husband, James Cameron.
"The part of me that makes me a good actress is that I'm a truth-teller. It makes me a good actress and a lousy movie star and celebrity."
Telling the truth makes her sister Leslie a great celebrity, Hamilton said. "She tells people she's really my twin, and they all say, 'Yeah, right,' and fuss over her even more. She loves it. She gets a lot of perks, good tables, airplane and hotel upgrades."
Leslie, formerly an emergency-room nurse and now in private practice with a neurosurgeon, has kept her hair long, much the way Hamilton wore hers when she starred as strongwoman Sarah Connor with Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator."
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