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The B word. In Hollywood, it. can be a blessing or a curse or both, depending on whom you talk to.

The word is beautiful. Some actresses-the beauties-can't even move their lips to form the cursed word. They stutter. They stammer. They rely heavily on denial. Listen to Shari Belafonte, a ravishing model-turned-actress: "I think I have moments, after makeup artists have gotten finished, after you're in the chair and the bags have gone away and the wrinkles are smoothed away, that are exotic and interesting and just different enough to make me look"-after much hesitation the word finally is uttered-"beautiful."

She continues: "People tell me. I'm beautiful all the time. I've had people tell me first thing in the morning, 'God, you're gorgeous,' and I look in the mirror and I'm going, 'What are you looking at?'"

Modesty aside, there actually may be some validity to Belafonte's discomfort with the B word. Once in charge of the information center on ABC's Hotel, Belafonte believes her looks have handicapped her acting career, especially when she was younger. "I can honestly say I have never been ".told that I've been turned down be cause I wasn't a good enough actress," she says. "I've actually had people say, 'You're too pretty for this part.' You sit there and you're going: Why? Why am I too pretty?'.' The actress has concluded that producers don't think they can get a story across if viewers are too preoccupied looking at an actress instead of listening to her.

"I read a wonderful script, and there's a delicious character part, and I just know I won't get it," says Sheree J. Wilson, who plays wealthy temptress April Stevens on CBS's Dallas. For instance, just before she was cast as April, Wilson heard about the casting of Garry Shandling's quirky next-door neighbor and platonic friend Nancy on It's Garry Shandling's Show. "The producers or casting director nixed me," `says Wilson. (Molly Cheek, an attractive woman but not a classic beauty, was hired.)

"Sometimes my agent doesn't even tell me about [auditions] because it's too frustrating," sighs Wilson. "Producers don't see an attractive woman as the wild hysterical Realtor or as the housewife with pink rollers in her hair and the puffy slippers. Those aren't the parts I get considered for. I would love the industry to know I would gain weight. I'll dye my roots black, I will do anything, within health reasons, to deflower my looks." Lynda Carter, who was television's voluptuous Wonder Woman and a former Miss World U.S.A., says she isn't "cast-able" in many roles she wants to be considered for because "they're very often about ordinary, everyday people, and when you put a beautiful woman in the role, it changes it entirely.

"My agent will go in and say, 'Lynda Carter is right for this part,' and the producer says, 'We're looking for someone a little earthier.' I can't go back through time and tell you which roles got away, but I know that is part of the scenario and has been for a while," Carter says.

So she now concentrates on producing her own television projects. Carter looks for scripts that feature "vulnerable parts . . . more down-to-earth characters. Less glossy, less coiffed. I don't necessarily mean the look-how-bad-I-can-look movies that everyone wins Emmys for, but real people."

Mary Frann (Newhart's Joanna Loudon) believes the problem is more acute in comedy than in drama. "People do not believe that a beautiful woman can be funny," states Frann. "Over and over again I hear a producer say, 'She's beautiful and she's funny?' It's like you're this creature from Mars. It's like a shock, a miracle. If you look funny, it's expected of you. But a pretty woman, they think, 'Oh, she probably doesn't have a sense of humor. She probably can't even talk'."

In the casting of Newhart, however, beauty was a definite plus. After she was hired, "the director was very blunt with me," recalls Frann. He said, 'You look young now, and we felt you would look young five years from now'." In other words, assuming the producers had a hit on their hands (the show is now in its seventh year on CBS), a lined and wrinkled potential wife for Bob Newhart would never do.

Some women take a philosophical stance on the whole matter. "I'm not conscious of my physicality," says Stepfanie Kramer (Hunter's Dee Dee McCall). "I deal from another place." Yes, there have been times producers have told her she was "the best actress for the role, but I was too pretty or too glamorous." Still, Kramer has concluded that her, well, physicality, is an asset. "But I don't obsess about it. The bottom line is that it's not what's truly lasting anyway. Therefore I focus on what truly is, and that's the inside light and my inner growth."

In the '80s, as increasing numbers of television series revolve around professional women, producers must decide how to depict them realistically. "Thank God for Aaron Spelling," howls Michelle Phillips, referring to the executive producer of such series as Dynasty, The Colbys and Hotel, on which Phillips played the concierge. "He won't cast unattractive women in his parts. They're all pretty and 20 years too young. Thank God. He doesn't care if they're doctors or lawyers or what.

"I did a pilot for him, a spin-off of Vega$ called 'Ladies in Blue.' Tanya Roberts and 1 were playing San Francisco cops, and there couldn't have been two more unlikely looking police women. Aaron took one look at our uniforms-and said, 'I want those skirts tightened and shortened; I want them to wear 3-inch heels; I want Michelle padded and her hair out to here'."

Apparently, other producers think along similar lines. After playing a femme fatale on One Life to Live, Nancy Stafford went on to portray a hospital administrator on St. Elsewhere and a social worker on the short-lived Sidekicks and is now Andy Griffith's junior legal partner on NBC's Matlock.

Stafford has carefully analyzed her looks and understands what makes her a marketable commodity. She is not the sexy, smoldering type. Rather, she is tall (5-foot-9) and stately. "As a professional I kind of make an imposing figure, and there's power in that."

"In the '80s, there's no contradiction between professionalism and beauty," says Deidre Hall, who spent the early part of her career typecast as "women who were pretty and had very little substance. I did play a dumb blonde once, and I did play secretaries who handed over an envelope and nurses who floated through scenes."

Hall says she broke the beauty barrier when she was cast as a psychiatrist on Days of Our Lives, where she spent 11 years. "Soaps," argues Hall, "were the first medium to cast women as professionals because soaps are watched by women, and they could see the women they wanted to become." Hall went on to read for the part of the "basic, simple, earthy" widowed mother of three on Our House. "My agent said, 'They're simply crazy about you, [but] they're afraid that you're much too pretty for the part, that the audience won't believe it, and you need to go in looking like the character." So, playing down her looks and wearing a jogging suit, a ponytail and a freshly scrubbed face, Hall was immediately hired.

For the part of a prostitute in the 1973 film "Dillinger," Michelle Phillips went in for her reading looking "real greasy. I hadn't washed my hair. I don't think I even bathed. I just decided I was going to look as sleazy as I can look."

That's not all she did. "I told ['Dillinger' director] John Millius my grandmother was a full-fledged Cherokee. He said, 'Really? This character is part Indian.' I said, 'Nooooo.' A few minutes later he was saying, '1 can see it now. I can see it. "Sometimes you're responsible for creating the illusions," explains the blonde, blue-eyed Phillips. And, yes, she got the part.