From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
No wonder she plays a cop on TV. When Michael Michele walks into a room, the effect can be lethal. "Guys start stuttering around her," says her Homicide: Life on the Street costar Clark Johnson, who has been "seeing heads do 360s" ever since the 5'9" knockout spiced up the testosterone-laden cast last fall. Fashion-biz pal Michael Quirk has also witnessed some awestruck reactions, saying that one friend of his "got so flustered, he told her his name was Fred Flintstone."

Yabba dabba doo indeed. But although Michele is "strikingly beautiful," says Homicide's executive producer Tom Fontana, "she's very easy to like, because there's not a lot of cuteness or pretension." For that, the older of two daughters of a business consultant of British descent and an African-American mother credits her athletic childhood in Evansville, Ind. Her basketball skills earned her a spot in an all-boy clique called the Fellas, where, she says, she was "never the cheerleader, always the ballplayer."

Unmarried and splitting her time between the Baltimore Homicide set and New York City, Michele, who was named after her mother's best female friend, is now a bit of both. Though she says that she wears "as little makeup as possible," the 32-year-old actress is devoted to Kiehl's eye cream, lip balm and moisturizer, and "long baths with lavender oil." To maintain that toned physique, she still shoots a mean game of hoops (Marlon Wayans, her costar in 1997's The 6th Man, says jokingly that he would only play against her in the hope of "some body checks") and runs three to four miles a day. If you cross her path, though, please keep the "Hey, baby" comments to yourself. "I'm confrontational," she says. "I'll turn around and say, 'Who you babying?' " Remember: This Michael is all woman.