Flashes: September 27, 1991

Movies
Grammy winner k.d. lang didn't win the best actress award (Laura Dern did, for Rambling Rose), but Salmonberries, the movie in which she makes her acting debut, garnered the top prize at the recent Montreal World Film Festival. ''I'm totally untrained as an actress, but I decided I wanted to do a movie,'' she says. As for the tale of a half-white, half-Inuit Indian orphan on a journey of self-discovery, lang adds, ''When the script arrived, I thought, 'This is just like my childhood in Alberta.''' It helped that the director, Percy Adlon, had directed one of the singer's favorite films, 1988's Bagdad Cafe, and that she had asked him to direct her ''So in Love'' video for the Red, Hot + Blue disc.

Books
Actor-turned-novelist Thomas Tryon (The Other, Harvest Home), who died this month at 65, had recently completed By the Rivers of Babylon, the second in a projected four-novel series about 19th-century New England. Knopf will publish it in the spring of '92, along with his The Adventures of Opal and Cupid, a children's book Warner Bros. is considering for film development. Tryon was also under contract with Simon & Schuster for a gothic horror novel, which was close to completion when he died of cancer.

TV
''When you're an actor, you're either a character actor or you play yourself,'' says Twiggy Lawson, who costars with Julie Hagerty and Fran Drescher on CBS' new sitcom, Princesses. ''The way I've always gotten parts is by playing characters who are close to me.'' This time around was no exception. The creators of the comedy — about three diverse women sharing digs — fashioned Twiggy's character, Georgy, with the 42-year-old '60s glamour girl in mind. The actress helped flesh out her part. ''When it came to Georgy, I had a choice. She could be either born a royal, or a princess through marriage. The born-royal thing is one joke, really. I saw Georgy as a step further than Eliza Doolittle: She grew up in a working-class family, she danced and sang, her prince saw her, and they lived happily for years until he died and the family, in dispute over the will, sent her to New York to be rid of her.''

When thirtysomething's Patricia Wettig won her third Emmy last month, she thanked her ''favorite director'' — her husband, Ken Olin. Others, apparently, are starting to share her favorite: Olin has already directed James Carrey (In Living Color) in this winter's Fox Broadcasting movie Doing Time on Maple Drive; now he'll step behind the camera again to direct Jimmy Smits in ABC's The Broken Cord, a fact-based drama about fetal alcohol syndrome, based on the best-selling book by Michael Dorris.

Written by: Leonard Klady, Tina Jordan, Mark Harris