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TV's Wonder Woman looks to new horizons

Life has already been good to Lynda Carter, who plays Wonder Woman, the comic strip heroine of the 1940's, on Friday nights on CBS.

Only 25 years old, she has already, in 1973, won the Miss U.S.A. contest and carried the title on into the Miss World contest. She's the star of a net-work television series, which many actors twice her age have never been able to claim. Already experienced as a singer, she has put together a night-club act.

And she is happily married.

She was .wed on May 28, 1977, to Ron Samuels, who is also her man-ager, and who also handled the careers of Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman) and Jaclyn Smith (Charlie's Angels).

It was Samuels who encouraged her to get back into singing.

Born in Phoenix, Arizona, the youngest of three children, she began singing professionally when she was fifteen years old, while she worked week ends at a pizza hangout in Tempe, Arizona. At Arcadia Titans High School, she was voted "most talented student". After graduation she matriculated to Arizona State University, decided to pursue a career in the entertainment field and began study-ing voice.

She sang with two groups, touring with them for almost two years. But traveling all the time displeased her, so she quit singing.

Through all the beauty pageants, and the filming of the Wonder Wo-man pilot, she avoided singing.

However, when she first met Samuels, she played a tape for him. He said he couldn't believe it was Lynda's voice, and asked why she wasn't singing.

Samuels arranged a co-hosting stint on The Mike Douglas Show about a year ago, during which she sang, and from that came a date at Caesar's Palace and a record album.

During her act, Lynda, who was giv-en a good review in her Caesar's Pal-ace debut, does both singing (she's an alto) and comedy. She talks about an earlier Las Vegas appearance, when she was at the Sahara at the age .of 17, There's a comic "baby talk" number and, with a bow to the current "Star Wars" rage, a segment themed to the future, complete with laser lights.

She's aware that Wonder Woman requires only minimal acting, but claims, in another way, that trying to make Wonder Woman believable re-quires a "lot of acting". She insists that she works hard to try to make her convincing. She expresses pride in her efforts to improve the character and her own performance.

Lynda expresses an awareness thather show must come to an end some day, although it will be back next sea-son, and says it won't distress her when it does. There'll be that singing career, and she also hopes to move on to other acting projects. She would like to do both television movies and feature films, and also is trying her hand at song-writing. She's a believer, she says, in doing a number of different things if you have the ability to do them.

Lynda was recently voted the most beautiful woman in the world by the International Academy Of Beauty in London. It's no doubt safe to say that her natural assets, enhanced by that skimpy costume, are what most people (including daddies who have suddenly taken an interest in their children's TV fare) notice.

But if you have real talent, that soon gets noticed too.