NEW YORK (AP) — Jennifer Love Hewitt doesn't really talk to the dead. Nor does she give spirits snagged in the physical realm a tender send-off to the great beyond.Despite starring on "Ghost Whisperer" as Melinda Gordon, a winsome antique-shopowner whose sideline is facilitating spooks, Hewitt doesn't fully buy into this ghost-whispering stuff.

"The hopeful part of me would really like to," she wavers. "The other part of me goes, `Well, maybe not'."

Either way, Hewitt feels a close bond with her character, though in this second year of the hit CBS drama (which airs tomorrow at 9 p.m. Bermuda time) not quite so close as before.

"The first season, it was very tough not to bring her home with me," says Hewitt, "especially the days we were doing the crossing-over scenes. I had to go, `Wait a minute — these are stories, and although Melinda is someone we all should strive to be, I can't on a daily basis — and still make it through a work schedule'.

"Now, at the end of the day, I go: `OK, Melinda, you're a wonderful person. Good night'."

Identifying with the characters she plays is Hewitt's style.

When I interviewed her seven years ago, she called Sarah Reeves someone who "has always been my best friend. I started playing her when I was 16, and everything that she's gone through, I've gone through."

Sarah, of course, was teenager Bailey's girlfriend on the Fox drama "Party of Five" who, in 1999, fled San Francisco for New York in search of her father on a spin-off created especially for Hewitt.

But "Time of Your Life" would be a single-season flop. And for Hewitt, whose professional debut had been at age ten on the Disney Channel series "Kids Incorporated", her bid to clinch adulthood in the character of Sarah was cut short prematurely.

The spectre loomed of Hewitt, then 21, as a teen ingenue past her prime, a fresh-faced siren with a celebrated figure who wasn't taken seriously as a grown-up.

"I hope that I'll be able to make the full transition into adult roles," she told me at the time, and indeed, she was already set to portray her idol, Audrey Hepburn, in an ambitious biopic she was producing for ABC.

After that, she appeared in a variety of features and TV films, including "The Tuxedo" (an action-comedy with Jackie Chan), "Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber" (as the title character) and the two animated "Garfield" movies.

For Hewitt, whose 28th birthday is next week, crossing over was something she always meant to do "in a smart way, the right way for me, gracefully.

"Actors have done it lots of different ways," she points out. "They'll play a drug addict and completely change their image.

"Or they'll go and take off all their clothes and be like, `Ohhh, I'm a woman!'" She chuckles. "THAT'S an approach — absolutely."

Did she get offers to take her clothes off?

"I got lots of those," she says with a smile. "But I can't. It's just not me.

"I feel like there's still a world-full of people out there who think there's not much more to me than the girl who can wear tiny tops. So if I had actually gone and DONE those things" — shedding the tiny top — "to try to prove something, where would I be?"

It happens that Hewitt's good-girl sheen makes her all the more impressive as a leading lady in the tank tops, nighties, sun-dresses and other cleavage-friendly garb her character displays ... though, oddly enough in wholesome, hometowny Grandview, no one (including Melinda's devoted husband) seems to notice her decolletage any more than they can see her needy ghosts.

"It's eye candy for the audience," Hewitt readily admits, "and I'm comfortable with that. And if I'm gonna go and wear a small top, let me play a character who's also got a lot of integrity and is very smart, and sincere and empathetic, so that viewers are seeing that, too."

For this interview, Hewitt's smile is sunny and her laugh infectious, much like our first meeting. But here she's sleekly attired in a smart-looking suit, in marked contrast to the woman-child of seven years ago who arrived for lunch in a sweater worn over a T-shirt, jeans, running shoes and a bandanna tied around her head, with a department-store shopping bag in tow that contained a teddy bear she had purchased that morning.

Hewitt's brown eyes twinkle now as she makes herself clear: She still likes teddy bears. And, just as she did then, she still pegs herself as a dork.

"I WANT to be a dork!" she insists, laughing. "It's fun to be goofy and silly."

All these years, Hewitt has been on a personal quest as much as a career path, where "I wasn't really focused on changing my image. I wanted to grow up in the public eye the way that I was actually growing up, which is a slow process, happening over time.

"This show has definitely helped me do it in a seamless manner," she adds, "playing a young woman who is married but also has an innocence and a childlike quality about her."

And as she plays Melinda, she is trying to follow Melinda's example: "Our show is about living life more honest and more fully. Not to leave the I'm-sorrys and the I-love-yous until too late.

"I have definitely started applying that to my own life," she says. While never losing touch with her inner dork.