Retro : Reruns to RE-Watch: Before They Were Oscar Winners

Not every performance by an Oscar-winning actress can be a class act.

Jodie Foster saved her serious acting for “The Accused” and much earlier in her career did the lightweight stuff, including a 1971 “My Three Sons” (Tuesday at midnight on Nickelodeon). Well, heck--she was only 9.

Louise Fletcher, the heartless Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” is the defendant--usually a synonym for dull-- on a Perry Mason (Friday at 7 p.m. on KDOC) from 30 years ago.

And Ellen Burstyn was only one of scores of beauties who passed through the set of Dobie Gillis. She guest stars in an episode (Wednesday at 8 p.m. on Nickelodeon) from 1962, 13 years before “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” (In the “Dobie Gillis” credits, she’s listed as Ellen McRae, one of several names she used after she dumped her real one, Edna Rae Gilhooley.)

All three actresses would go on to do more television: Foster would be featured in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” and star in the short-lived “Paper Moon” in the mid-’70s, and Burstyn would have regular roles on “The Iron Horse” and “The Doctors” and later star in “The Ellen Burstyn Show” in the ‘80s. Fletcher can be seen in such quality TV movies as “Second Serve” and “The Karen Carpenter Story.”