Maren Jensen is the breathtakingly beautiful Athena in ABC's hit series Battlestar Galactica. As a lieutenant in charge of communications on the starship, and also the daughter of Commander Adama (Lorne Greene), she gets to 'save the day' on many occasions. Athena is resourceful, caring and independent, but, says Maren, "She has emotional downfalls that she must learn to overcome." Maren is a native Californian. She attributes her striking combination of blue eyes and dark hair to her Hawaiian mother and Danish-descent father. Her exotic features and lithe figure have helped her become a top fashion model. She has appeared on the covers of Vogue, Mademoiselle and Britain's Cosmopolitan. Modeling is not Maren's first love, however. After three years studying pre-law at UCLA and appearing in campus productions, she left school to concentrate on an acting career. She became involved in modeling as a sort of detour from her theatrical goal. It was a fortunate sideroad to take since it brought her to the attention of Hollywood producers. Work in commercials came as a result of this attention, then a role on the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, and now Battlestar Galactica. At 21, Maren is as articulate and charming as she is lovely. She takes her acting very seriously and would like to go on to play many different roles. But for now, all the new worlds Maren Jensen has time to explore are in outer space.

In her third year of college at UCLA, Maren made the biggest decision of her life. She had been studying pre-law on a scholarship, but was also active in the school's drama department. Should she go on to three more years of law school or turn to the risky career of acting? The excitement of Hollywood and the film world was too much for Maren to resist. Though she was prepared to struggle along as she waited for that all-important break, it wasn't long before she was asked by a fashion photographer to join a professional modeling agency and overnight she became one of New York's top models. If her face looks familiar, it's because you've seen her on the cover of Mademoiselle and Cosmopolitan, not to mention a number of television commercials. But even with all these credits, Maren was most excited when she won her first prime-time role as a guest star on "Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries," which eventually led to her role on "Battlestar Galactica." When she's not working, Maren likes doing yoga exercises on the deck of her Malibu beach house. She likes playing and writing music, and collecting ladies' fans and unusual mask.

Maren Kawehilani Jensen--the middle name means "the morning mist from heaven" in Hawaiian--stared reflectively into space, her blue eyes squinting with impatience. She was groping for the precise commingling of words to express her mood. Then, brightening she had the phrase in her grasp, "I have no angst to bear," she said, finally.

Angst? A word from the verbal labyrinth of psychiatry, angst is defined as a "condition of anxiety, gloom, despair." "But then," she said, "why should I?" Why, indeed? She is 22, not long from the ranks of the fashion models, tall, sleek, and beautiful-and, in her second role on television, she is seen by millions as Athena in ABC's extraterrestrial hit, Battlestar Galatica.

"I did have a touch of angst once," she says, the features erupting into a full candle-power smile. This occurred during her first television role, in a episode of Hardy boys Mysteries. They were filming on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, by a lagoon on Kailua Bay. "In one scene," Maren remembers, "I was supposed to walk toward Parker Stevenson on the beach. The director says, 'Action.' The camera starts to roll. I'm sitting on the sand and I get up to walk, and suddenly I'm shaking and screaming bloody murder. Somebody in the crew rushed over and reached into my bikini pants and pulled out a jellyfish that was nipping stubbornly at my bottom. Later, a doctor gave me shots as an antidote and he applied meat tenderizer where the jellyfish had bitten me."

But a flash, of momentary angst was a small price to pay. The executive producer of Hardy Boys Mysteries, Glen Larson, had another project in mind for Maren: namely, Battlestar Galactica. "We wanted an actress who was, quite simply and unequivocally, truly gorgeous," says Larson, Battlestar's creator and executive producer, "but with a certain futuristic, exotic look. That's Maren."

What he didn't expect was an accomplished actress, which Maren Jensen definitely is not. At first, Larson weighed the possibility of diluting her part. Subsequently he entrusted her to and action coach. Maren studied diligently and held her ground. Richard Hatch, who plays Battlestar's Apollo, views Maren sympathetically. "Even for experienced actors, all that technical space dialogue isn't easy," he says. "Maren listens and she's learning. What's more important, she doesn't have that big ego. She's a rarity--a beautiful young woman who doesn't expect everybody to pay homage to her."

As the conversation spins around to her undeniable beauty, Maren's smile is wan, almost resigned. "IF I were very unattractive," she says, choosing her words with deliberation, "I know I wouldn't have been picked for the role. What I don't know is if that is good or bad. It just is. TV is merely a reflection of our society today. People like to look at a beautiful girl falling out of a bikini. It's not something I get mad as hell about, but I don't enjoy people liking me only for the way I look."

Known for her shyness on the Galactica set, Maren issues her views now with unexpected candor. "Frankly," she says, "and knowing these is my first job of any consequence I'm not altogether satisfied with the role. It's very much a macho show. The men have the most of it. There're been a few sexist things. In one show, we had women pilots, and every last one was a raving beauty. Who knows what life will be like so far ahead in time, but will all the women pilots be young and gorgeous?"

"Subtle things," she says, "I noticed at the start that they didn't have any women on the bridge of the spaceship. Now they do have a few--somebody must have noticed besides me."

Is she a feminist? Well, more or less. "I support ERA," she says, "but if a man opens a door for me, I'm not insulted. I'll open the door for him next time. I always offer to pick up my lunch or dinner tab if I'm with a man. But I like to dress up and look pretty. I don't cut off my own sexuality. But I truly wish that looks weren't given such a high premium in this business."

If she appears to sway in the middle of conflicting shifts of thought, it seems to her appropriate. "I've always felt somewhat alienated, apart from the group- different," she says. Her father, a doctor, is of Danish lineage; her mother, a former operatic soprano, is Hawaiian, with some distant French and English strains, who was born in Honolulu. "Even in grammar school, in Glendale Cal., kids thought I was strange. I wasn't totally white like everybody else I was a little bit darker, olive-toned. I had a middle name nobody could pronounce. Luckily, I had something going for me-I was a brainy kid."

She breezed through school, a straight A student, and won a scholarship to UCLA. Despite a reasonably affluent background, she was always fiercely independent and worked for her own spending money through high school and the two years she attended UCLA. She was a waitress, a pizza maker, an usherette, a computer operator, and she acted in campus productions. "People kept saying to me, 'You're a pretty girl. You can make some money modeling.' So I became a model for one reason-to pay the bills. Modeling was a lark; acting was always the goal."

In her junior year at UCLA, she dropped out to parlay a full-time modeling career into Hollywood stardom. She acquired an agent and read for casting directors. She tested unsuccessfully for "Hurricane" and "Paradise Alley."

Then, a year ago last November, she first tested for Battlestar Galactica. "I never saw it but apparently it was decent enough. Then I did Hardy Boys Mysteries and tested again and won out over nine other girls. But never felt I was competing. Acting is only you against yourself."

Unmarried, but with a boy friend whose identity she prefers to withhold ("If I talked about my private life, it wouldn't be private, would it?") , she recently moved into a two- bedroom house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. She prizes her antiques, her art books and a bizarre Salvador Dali block print. She devours science fiction by Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. She subscribes to a regimen of hatha yoga and she falls in with the current fad of roller skating. "What I am not," Maren Jensen says, "is a 'Hollywood person.' I'm nor part of any 'scene.' My friends are the people I knew at UCLA. I try to keep my private life apart from my public life and I try to keep both lives simple. At 22, it's very nice to have a contract of maybe $100,000 a year over a term that could be 10 years. I'm definitely not hurting."

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