EVERYTHING about Lindsay Wagner is unusual by Hollywood standards.

There's an airiness and a gentleness about her that makes her seem more like a forest nymph than a typical glittering star.

She seems fragile and intangible. At times her voice is almost inaudible. She avoids the spotlight and even eye-to-eye contact for any prolonged period. Shyness is not the right word. It's more a lack of push.

Her three-storey rustic home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., sits in a sheltered, woodsy canyon close enough to the ocean to smell the clean salt air.

It's a perfect setting for the all-natural Wagner, a strict vegetarian who wears no makeup and lets her dark-blond hair fall casually to her shoulders.

THE ACTRESS settles herself on a white couch to talk about her latest mini-series To Be the Best, based on a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, the third in a trilogy. It airs in two parts on CBS-TV Sunday and Tuesday (9 p.m. Detroit's WJBK-TV Channel 2, cable 6).

The mini-series was filmed in England and Hong Kong and stars Wagner as Paula O'Neill, the designated heir to her grandmother's department-store empire.

Standing in the way of her success is her vindictive cousin (played by Christopher Cazenove). Anthony Hopkins co-stars as the head of security for the stores and the person who tries to protect Paula from her cousin.

"There's one romantic scene between us," Wagner says of her character and Hopkins' character, "but then my husband walks in on us!"

SINCE HER hit TV series The Bionic Woman in the 1970s, for which she was awarded an Emmy (Best Actress in a Dramatic Series, 1977), Wagner has racked up nearly 30 television movies.

More important than her credits, she says, are the messages her films carry.

"People say, 'I'm going to make a movie because I think I can sell it,' " she says. "They don't think about where it's going and who it will affect. To me, some of these movies contaminate minds.

"You might as well be going down to the grade schools and selling smack or crack or whatever they're calling the stuff now.

"There are just a handful of people in this business who think about what they're communicating, who see communication as a responsibility, and I'm proud to be a part of that minority."

She says it's harder when you don't play the game.

"People don't like you for that reason," Wagner says. "I've had my ups and downs and my trials, but I think I'm focused and I think most people are missing a purpose for their work."

More than a decade ago Wagner was struggling with the lack of morality in Hollywood and gained a reputation of being difficult on the set.

She was nearly burnt out after The Bionic Woman and the stresses and pressures of work were compounded by medical problems. But mostly she was coming to grips with the realities of show business.

"I WAS RAISED by the Golden Rule," she says, "but I found that no one in this business had ever heard of it. At one point I found myself talking to God and yelling, 'You forgot the movie indusry!'

"But since then I have run into some very responsible people on both sides of the camera."

The 42-year-old actress, who still looks thirtysomething, favors roles that teach as well as entertain.

"I tend to look for pieces that will be helpful to people in some way," she says. "If I could find a comedy that would help people I'd grab it."

MOST OF HER vehicles have been heavy dramas: Scruples (1980); Callie and Son (1981); I Want To Live and Princess Daisy (1983); Passions (1984); This Child Is Mine and The Other Lover (1985); Child's Cry (1986); A Stranger in My Bed (1987); and The Taking of Flight 847 (1988).

It was her role in Voice of the Heart (1990), based on another of Bradford's best-selling novels, that led Wagner to reveal publicly a personal trauma from her past: She had been date-raped at 14.

"My character in the mini-series had been sexually abused, never received help, and her life was destroyed because she was never able to deal with what happened," she says.

"I didn't seek help for many years after the incident in my own life. Eventually I did and I know what a difference it made.

"That's the only reason I ever discussed what happened to me. People need to hear from someone with firsthand experience that help is available."

She says her subsequent TV movie Shattered Dreams (1991) showed the benefits of getting help for sexual abuse. Wagner has been a spokesperson for domestic violence-awareness programs.

She also felt very connected to her role as the managing director of a big-city zoo in her short-lived CBS-TV series A Peaceable Kingdom.

"I've always had a natural empathy for animals," Wagner says. "I used to go to zoos as a kid and my heart would break seeing those magnificent lions and tigers pacing back and forth in those dinky cages.

"But I think the consciousness has been raised and in these New Age-type zoos they are making preserves as opposed to little cages."

Thrice divorced - her third husband Henry Kingi is the father of her two sons, Dorian, eight, and Alex, five - Wagner is currently finding happiness with producer Larry Motoroff, whom she wed in May 1990.

"IT'S WONDERFUL to have a partner who is as dedicated to personal growth and evolution as I am, so we're not at cross-purposes," she says of her husband, also 42. (He has three daughters from his first marriage.)

"Given that main goal we can be partners for each other and help each other. If I have a problem we can talk about it. There's no defensiveness, no resistance, even to talking about him, which is usually the off-limits area. It takes two to play the game of growth."

Wagner says she still holds the dream of having it all, a successful career and a happy marriage.

"ACTORS LIVE with much more pressure on their private lives. You have to fight for privacy and everything you do is magnified. And if you have an actress married to a non-celebrity and she is suddenly making millions of dollars and when they go out to dinner people say to him, 'Hello, Mr. Wagner,' I don't care who the husband is, even a top research scientist - he's going to get upset."

A sense of family is a top priority with Wagner. Born in Los Angeles to teenage parents who were divorced by the time she was seven, she lived with relatives until her last year at North Hollywood High School, then moved to Portland, Ore., to be with her remarried mother and stepfather.

But after a year at the University of Oregon she returned to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

"My interest was not to become a movie glamor queen," she says. "My interest in this business was all about communication and having this incredible medium to work in."

When Universal Studios finally talked Wagner into doing The Bionic Woman she decided to create a new kind of character, one that used violence only in self-defence and never for the sake of violence.

"I wanted my character Jamie Sommers to use her superhuman strength only as a backup to her mind," she says.

"I hit my head against a lot of brick walls (i.e. studio executives) before I was done."

And she succeeded. While Lee Majors' character on The Six Million Dollar Man - from which The Bionic Woman was a spinoff - would toss six gangsters into the river to drown, Sommers would use her muscle to drop a pile of rocks on the bad guys and force them to give up.

"I WANTED TO convey that power is in the mind and that the body is just another tool you use," Wagner says. "I didn't want to be a superwoman."

Wagner hopes all her projects convey the right messages.

"I have a lot of people in the world looking at me, especially young people and, right or wrong, they might want to emulate the character they see me portray," she says.

Angela Fox Dunn, The Windsor Star