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Lynda makes dramatic debut Hollywood's procession of eye-popping beauties is nearly always boringly predictable.

Year by year, new entrants join the cavalcade of loveliness to be cheered, admired, envied. To be mass-reproduced on posters. To murmur beauty product testimonials. To gaze alluringly from magazine covers. To have their T&A jiggle complained about and leered at. Then, to be forgotten by a fickle public engrossed in the attraction prancing up behind them.

A few years ago, Lynda Carter - beauty contest winner and comic book TV character - seemed a likely candidate to go the usual route. When "Wonder Woman" talked about the album she was making and the showroom revue she was putting together, the industry chuckled its collective cynical chuckle.

But Lynda's Caesars Palace debut ended up garnering such outstanding reviews that even the most die-hard skeptics found it hard to quibble. Her "Portrait" LP also met with praise (though it failed to become a commercial winner) and earlier this year her first TV special generated more dream notices.

Because of its success, she had a second special, "Lynda Carter: Encore!" which aired recently on CBS. The show featured elaborate production numbers, London Palladium concert sequences and several of Lynda's own songs.

Lynda is aware of those sounds of cynical chuckling starting up again now that it's time for her to make her dramatic TV film debut. The moment comes Thursday at 9 p.m., when CBS airs "The Last Song," a $2 million movie produced by Lynda's manager-husband Ron Samuels.

"People are thinking, 'Her first dramatic role? Okay. We'll just wait and see how she does.'"

No matter what the response, Lynda is proud of her "Song," a vehicle completely unlike "Wonder Woman."

"The focus," she says, "is not ,another pretty girl doing a TV film,' it's on the story. It's no fashion show. In a lot of it, I look a lot less-than-perfect - because with what this character goes through she'd look ridiculous wearing perfect makeup and so forth. She's a very complex character who's also a mother, which is another departure for me.

"I told Ron I didn't want to do a fluff movie," Lynda adds. It's hard to imagine a topic much less "fluff" than the one they chose: chemical pollution. It's also hard to imagine a topic less inviting. "But it's not at all a downer," Lynda insists. "It's a dramatic piece with a lot of action - a suspense thriller about a cover-up, 'China Syndrome' style.

"The writers researched it for two years. It's fictional, but based on fact. It was really, really interesting to see the response we were getting as we were working on it. We have a file of official legal letters from various chemical companies. We were watched closely by the EPA.

"We ended up having to take out a few lines we wanted to say - which actually seem mild in comparison to some of the newspaper accounts of waste dumping and other chemical pollution going on today. We had to change names of some chemicals when we found out that certain ones were directly associated with specific companies. "You know," she adds, "at least people know where nuclear waste has been dumped. But chemical wastes have been dumped indiscriminately for the last 25 years. The dumping has only recently become regulated and, even so, the maximum penalties for failing to follow the regulations aren't what you'd call stiff."

Gone is the guarded, almost defensive attitude she once displayed when asked about "Wonder Woman" or about the size of the role her husband has played in her career. The 28-vear-old, Phoenix, Ariz., native who started her pursuit of showbiz glory as a singer (she slipped into the Las Vegas Sahara Hotel's lounge via the kitchen in order to perform there at age 17), has obviously gained confidence over the last two years.

Looking back, Lynda says she understands why people might have had doubts about the range of her talent. "The series did a lot for me, but there was just not much opportunity for acting. Besides, to everyone who didn't watch it, I was an unknown."

Once bothered by continuous references to Samuels as her Svengali, Lynda now seems only too happy to go into a long discourse about her husband of three years and his expertise in the ways of business - for herself as well as for other clients such as Lindsay Wagner.

"Universal didn't like Ron Samuels at the time he negotiated for Lindsay (Wagner, TV's "Bionic Woman") the deal that finally put women leads on an equal pay footing with male leads," Lynda says with a slow smile, "but now they've hired him to produce for them on a non-exclusive basis. That's the way it goes - as soon a company can get somebody who's proven to be tough competition over on their side of the table, they will...

"When he first heard me sing, he said, 'One more year on "Wonder Woman" and I can get you into Vegas.' I didn't believe him. A year later, I was headlining at Caesars. He's just very, very good at what he does." Lynda glows about Ron's managing to put together her October $100;000-all-pro Lynda Carter-Maybelline Tennis Classic, a feat he learned was "impossible" from others in the business, "after he'd already done it," she laughs.

The Samuels' future plans for Lynda include another TV film and a theatrical feature (the latter to be another switchup, a comedy, as well as more concert work. She'll also keep busy serving as this year's chairperson for The Crippled Children's League.