By Mary Shaffer
and Jerry Bunin
Telegram-Tribune

Jessica Lange always plays the ''the girl next door,'' only smarter, tougher, more independent and more troubled.

The actress earned a Golden Globe and could take her second Oscar on Monday for her critically-acclaimed portrait of a frustrated and disturbed 1950's military wife in ''Blue Sky,'' a film that was made in 1991 but just released last year.

Two more Lange films will reach theatres in March and April: ''Losing Isaiah,'' a contemporary drama about a white mother fighting to keep custody of her adopted black child, and ''Rob Roy,'' an 18th Century historical drama starring Liam Neeson.

She'll also appear on TV in 1995, reprising her 1992 Broadway debut as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' ''A Streetcar Named Desire.''

Unlike her contemporary, Meryl Streep, who often submerges her personality behind an accent, Lange brings a distinct screen persona to every role, like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.

Lange's characters are independent, strong-willed and hard- working. They are passionate and restless yet emotionally vulnerable, perhaps reflecting Lange's own transient childhood as the daughter of a traveling salesman.

Like Lange -- who quit the University of Minnesota to travel and study mime in Paris -- her characters are intelligent if not always educated, soft-spoken yet rowdy and rarely dull or normal.

Actor Jack Nicholson described his co-star in ''The Postman Always Rings Twice'' as ''a fawn crossed with a Buick.''

The film, her third, was a box office dud but features a memorable sexual tryst where Lange and Nicholson engage in wild sex astride a kitchen table.

After her debut in the campy remake of ''King Kong,'' Lange had a small but pivotal role as the Angel of Death in ''All That Jazz,'' director-choreographer Bob Fosse's extraordinary semi- autobiographical musical about a fatal heart attack.

But her real breakthrough came in 1982 with dual Oscar nominations in the harrowing ''Frances'' and the hilarious ''Tootsie.''

Director Graeme Clifford, who edited ''Postman,'' cast Lange as tragic movie actress Frances Farmer. Lange said she felt a ''cosmic connection'' with the politically active 1930s actress trapped between a domineering mother and a suffocating Hollywood studio system that conspired to break her independent spirit.

They succeed in making her ''dull, average, normal'' by pushing her into a barbaric mental health system where she endures shock therapy, rape, torture and finally a prefrontal lobotomy.

Lange lost the Best Actress Oscar to Streep in ''Sophie's Choice'' but won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Dustin Hoffman's love interest in the gender-bender farce ''Tootsie.'' She immediately followed ''Tootsie'' with Best Actress nominations for ''Country'' and ''Sweet Dreams,'' and got a fifth nomination in ''Music Box,'' four films later.

In ''Country,'' which she also produced, Lange is the center of a three-generation farm family fighting to preserve its land and way of life when the federal government tries to foreclose on inflated loans it approved.

The film was clearly personal for the Cloquet, Minn., native who often testified before Congress on behalf of farmers fighting foreclosures in the 1980s. ''All those midwestern traits-- honesty, simplicity, lack of ambition--those virtues I used to see as dull, I now see as admirable,'' she said in 1981.

Lange next played country torch singer Patsy Cline in ''Sweet Dreams,'' a film biography focusing on Cline's rise to stardom, stormy marriage, and tragic death.

The film is not as good as ''Coal Miner's Daughter'' (1980), which it closely resembles, but Lange makes Cline's blues and personal tragedies seem real, and the terrific soundtrack mixes original songs by Cline with early rock 'n' roll.

In ''Music Box,'' the tragedy focuses on Lange as a lawyer defending her immigrant father accused of committing Nazi war crimes 37 years earlier in Hungary. While Lange is effective, the story is predictable and not entirely credible.

The full range of her talents are better displayed in ''Men Don't Leave,'' an excellent if little known comedy-drama.

Lange stars as a happily married middle-class wife and mother of two whose secure life is suddenly shattered when her husband dies and she must learn to support herself and her family.

The film -- the sophomore effort by director Paul Brickman following ''Risky Business'' (1983) -- again seems to tap some of the tumult in Lange's personal life.

She was married briefly as a young adult to Spanish photographer Paco Grande. She has a daughter by dancer-actor Mikhail Baryshnikov and a daughter and son by her current significant other, playwright-actor Sam Shepard.

The equally complex Shepard appears in four films with Lange: ''Frances,'' ''Country,'' ''Far North'' (which he wrote and directed), and ''Crimes of the Heart."

Based on Beth Henley's Pulitzer-prize winning play, ''Crimes'' is an indescribly weird black comedy about three eccentric Southern sisters coming to grips with their past, including a notorious mother who hanged herself along with the family cat.

The film cast three previous Oscar-winners as the sisters. Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek and Lange shared a house during the filming and, according to Spacek, ''genuinely liked each other."

That comes across on the screen and in every role Lange plays.

• ''King Kong'' (1976)
• ''All That Jazz'' (1979)
• ''How to Beat the High Cost of Living'' (1980)
• ''The Postman Always Rings Twice'' (1981)
• ''Frances'' (1982)
• ''Tootsie'' (1982)
• ''Country'' (1984)
• ''Sweet Dreams'' (1985)
• ''Crimes of the Heart'' (1986)
• ''Far North'' (1988)
• ''Everybody's All-American'' (1988)
• ''Music Box'' (1989)
• ''Men Don't Leave'' (1990)
• ''Cape Fear'' (1991)
• ''Night and the City'' (1992)
• ''Blue Sky'' (1994)
• ''Losing Isaiah'' (1995)
• ''Rob Roy'' (1995)

Television

• ''The Best Little Girl in the World'' (1981)
• ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' (1985)
• ''O, Pioneers'' (1991)
• ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' (1995)

Broadway

• ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' (1992)