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On CBS' Chicago Hope a few weeks ago, high-strung doctor and would-be astronaut Kate Austin was suddenly fired. She left the hospital hoping for bigger and better things -- as does her alter ego, Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe winner Christine Lahti, who's in pre-production on My First Mister, the first feature film she'll direct. It's just the latest stage in a multifaceted career.''I find (directing) really intriguing,'' says Lahti, 49, who won her Oscar as a first-time director on the 1995 Showtime short Lieberman in Love. Still, ''I will never stop acting.''
Indeed, she's front and center in USA Network's Judgment Day: The Ellie Nesler Story, premiering tonight at 9 ET/PT. Lahti plays the northern California vigilante who in 1993 killed -- in court -- the Sunday-school teacher charged with molesting her 7-year-old son. Nesler was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was released on parole after four years in 1997.
''I loved how she wasn't a hero or a villain,'' says Lahti, who spent time with Nesler, now battling breast cancer. ''She wasn't an angel or a devil, but somewhere in the middle.''
Her position on the crime?
''I hope that people walk away with the feeling that they understand and have compassion for this woman, but that it was the wrong thing to do.''
Lahti's four-year Chicago Hope contract was up at the end of the 1998-99 season. When creator David E. Kelley returned to the show with the mandate to radically revamp it, most of the Hope actors lost their gigs. Lahti says her exit was a mutual decision.
''I'm happy to move on, but it was a little abrupt the way it all ended,'' she says. ''I would have loved to have a long, drawn-out dramatic ending. It would have been great to have been shot off into space and never come back, or maybe walk down the hall and suddenly implode, leaving nothing but a pair of smoking high heels.''
For now, she's enjoying time off with her three children and preparing for her movie, which will begin production in September.
She calls it a ''reverse Harold and Maude'' about a platonic relationship between a 50-year-old man (Albert Brooks) and an 18-year-old girl (not yet cast). ''It's nonromantic, and I want to stress that,'' she says. ''Because I'm tired of seeing middle-aged men cast in movies opposite young female love interests. I don't want to be part of that trend.''
