Stacy Edwards Operates At `Chicago Hope'

She's had recent movie success "In the Company of Men," but she's now in the company of TV doctors.

Once a fixture on the guest-star circuit, Stacy Edwards has returned to the home screen, appearing Wednesdays as the newest co-star of the CBS medical drama "Chicago Hope" (10 p.m. on KIRO-TV). She plays Dr. Lisa Catera, a spirited neurosurgeon who's struggling to make herself at home in the hospital.

That isn't destined to change in this week's episode, which finds the newcomer harassed by an ex-boyfriend, prompting her to accept Dr. Jack McNeil's (Mark Harmon) offer to use his wilderness cabin for a weekend away. Hoping for some female bonding, she brings Dr. Kathryn Austin (Christine Lahti) and Dr. Diane Grad (Jayne Brook) along, but the women face peril from dangerous weather as well as a threatening intruder.

"I knew I wanted to do another really great role soon," Edwards says of the "Chicago Hope" part. "I liked Dr. Catera, but I also liked the other people on the show. It's a wonderful cast filled with actors who also do films, and the producers are great about writing around someone's schedule. In fact, Peter Berg is directing his first film right now, so his character, Dr. Kronk, is supposedly off in Peru. They're very supportive, so this wasn't a tough decision for me."

In her work on daytime's "Santa Barbara," Edwards often played somebody's girlfriend or a victim in a mystery. Dr. Catera marks a big change, and she deems the role "one of the better jobs I've had. I was intimidated at first because `Chicago Hope' is a prestigious show that's been around a while, with seasoned actors I've admired for a long time. Luckily, they're also fun people who love what they do, and they've been great to me."

Edwards sympathizes with Dr. Catera's early efforts to make friends among her co-workers: "I was always the new girl in school, because my dad was in the military, so it was funny to have the emotions that came up when I was doing my first few episodes. That was very close to home for me, and the writers are still discovering who Dr. Catera is, just as I am. It's nice to be in a situation where you can see the structure and layers of your character develop."

The tale slated to air Wednesday was a big help in that, Edwards says. "I hadn't had a chance to work with Christine yet, and my scenes with Jayne had been kind of limited. This was nine days of all of us working side by side, and I enjoyed it a lot, though that feeling doesn't coincide with the characters' story line. When tragedy strikes, people sometimes break apart rather than come together."