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HER HANDS scissoring around her shag haircut, Susan Dey emits whirring noises.
"Cutting off my hair really helped," she says, explaining the short cut she got to help her get inside the character of a drug-addicted mother in the ABC movie "Lies and Lullabies," airing at 8 p.m. Sunday on Channel 2.
Of course, the new do is also in evidence in "Love & War" (8:30 p.m. Mondays on Channel 4), the CBS sitcom in which Dey stars as Wally Porter, a recovering divorcee entangled in an odd-couple romance with a carefree reporter, played by Jay Thomas.
Both these characters are long stretches from her determinedly concerned Grace in "L.A. Law," the slick drama series, and her ideal-teen Laurie in "The Partridge Family," the early-70s soft-pop sitcom.
It may be foolish to read too much into a haircut. But watching and listening to Dey as she talks about where she is now in her life and her career, the rumpled, uneven style (which, she notes, was inspired by memories of fringe rocker Marianne Faithful) can be seen as symbolic. It reflects a sort of sweet, sad sexiness, suggesting hidden complexities Dey is now much more comfortable with revealing both professionally and personally, and it is, simply, more liberated, denoting a much stronger sense that life may not be tidy, but it can be dealt with.
Dey, 40, says her surprise is not that she is still successful on screen in the business after all these years, but that "I'm...