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Dana Delany likes nurses. Here's one reason. "I was in an emergency room," Delany said, repeating a story she told to the American Nurses Association. "I was in the ER with abdominal pain. The doctor had literally come off the golf course. He looked at me and said, 'We're going to take out your appendix.'

"The nurses said, 'Don't let him cut you. Put on your clothes and call your own doctor.' They were right. It turned out to be stress. That's all it was."

Delany said that she would love to hang out with nurses any day, although she doesn't have them in her life as much as she used to.

Many nurses feel the same way about her, fondly remembering her portrayal of Lt. Colleen McMurphy on the television show "China Beach." The show went off the air a decade ago, but adamant fans have not forgotten.

Even Vietnam veterans write to Delany about their wartime experiences in hospitals. "Mostly I get letters from vets talking about nurses who saved them," she said. "They all talk about the nurse as an angel of mercy. [The letters] are from men saying, 'I think about [the nurse] every day and wonder where she is.' "

"China Beach" followed the lives of several characters-mainly focusing on the women-working in an Army surgical hospital close to the front lines. The characters included not only nurse McMurphy, but a USO singer, a hostess, a prostitute and an undertaker.

McMurphy was the camp tomboy, a Florence Nightingale in olive fatigues who had grown up with several brothers and worked hard to hide her femininity, with varying degrees of success.

She was the one character who most successfully internalized her feelings, becoming something of a long-suffering saint during years of tragedy (including the death of a friend).

Such is McMurphy's appeal among nurses that many were unhappy when NURSEWEEK failed to mention Delany in a cover story on media images of nursing ("Picture Imperfect," May 7).

ABC canceled "China Beach" in 1991, vexing fans, but the show recently found a home once again on The History Channel. The station airs episodes twice a day on weekdays, juxtaposing the show with brief interviews with Vietnam veterans.

"I didn't know so many people watched The History Channel," Delany said. "We were doing a fictional show and now we're history. There's an old John Ford quote: 'When history becomes legend, print the legend.' "

Delany, who was born in New York and grew up in Connecticut, was always in love with acting and never considered nursing as a profession. Nor, at the outset of the show, had she spoken to any wartime nurses about their experiences, other than her technical adviser. She approached the character as a female version of Clint Eastwood, she said, somebody nonverbal.

Whatever her take on the character, it hit a nerve with nurses. She has even found, to her pleasure, that she has become a recruiter. "I get a lot of messages on my Web site," Delany said. "My favorite is from someone who saw the show when they were 10 and decided to become a nurse."

Delany, who won two Emmy Awards for her role, sees the McMurphy character as a combination of different aspects of nursing.

"She was definitely the angel of mercy," Delany said. "There's a line from the show where she says, 'I'm the last person they see before they die and the last one who's holding their hand.' On the other hand, you saw the sacrifices nurses had to make then and now. They have to take in all this pain and there's no place to put it. That was true for nurses in Vietnam. There was so much attention given to the soldiers that [the nurses] thought they had no right to complain."

In the end, however, the show also tried to demonstrate the risks behind too much emotional repression. "China Beach" eventually left the war behind and fast-forwarded several years. The older McMurphy was less heroic and more fragile. "Hopefully, we showed the downside [of the repression]," Delany said. "There was a price to pay for holding it in. She became an alcoholic and roamed the world and took a long time to find herself."

Delany's work on "China Beach" and her appeal in health care circles led to her advocacy efforts off-screen. She has spoken at benefits for the American Nurses Association, made public service announcements for the American Red Cross and starred in a recruitment video. The video project, affiliated with the Texas Hospital Association, was named the McMurphy Nursing Project in honor of her character. Delany also was involved in the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project.

Delany calls McMurphy a composite of people she knows, not based on any particular character, though some suspected she was based on Diane Carlson Evans of the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project. The actress said she felt a lot of pressure to get the role right. In the beginning, she confesses, she felt she had no right to play the part at all.

"I had never had experienced anything as horrific [as a war], so it was intimidating," she said. "They had a bunch of nurses talking to us. [The first year], I didn't know what to ask because there were so many questions."

At the time, there was another show on the air called "Nightingales"-probably the nadir of television's portrayal of nurses. Confronting a possible backlash, the "China Beach" crew felt something of a moral obligation to the subject matter, Delany said. Although some viewers complained in the beginning (protesting the comic elements), the critics were drowned out by a chorus of fans and a lot of goodwill.

"It was more gallows humor than making fun of it," Delany said. "The thing I love about nurses is their sense of humor, because they have to deal with so much trauma. They are no-nonsense, funny people."

McMurphy has naturally cast a long shadow on Delany's career. In the years after "China Beach," she moved on to more risqué roles in what might have been seen as a move to change her image. (The Rosie O'Donnell film "Exit To Eden" found Delany playing a leather-clad dominatrix.) Her new television show on Fox, "Pasadena," is also a departure.

"It's the antithesis of McMurphy," she said. "I hope that people are not shocked. I play a neurotic heiress of a newspaper fortune. It's fun. It's pretty wild. She is not the nurturer." "Pasadena" airs Friday nights.

While she's hoping that people are open to the new character, she still feels a yearning and lingering love for the old one. Delany will probably forever be competing with herself. Some people have told her flatly: "You've never done anything as good as McMurphy."