It's hard to know whether to believe her or not. Swinging her blond hair off her shoulder in one of those stiff-necked moves that cheerleaders used to make in high school, Rebecca De Mornay shoves out her hand, insisting, "It is so nice to meet you after all these years."

Say what?

"Of course," she says, swinging her naughty hair again. "I don't watch TV, but I do \o7 read\f7 ."

Her face is imperturbable--"a saucer of cream" somebody once said--but she cuts the serenity with a startlingly intense gaze like the one she used to snooker poor Annabella Sciorra in "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle." A good girl, bad girl. Or is it the other way around?

"You know it's funny how life unfolds in such strange ways," says De Mornay, dropping onto the hotel room sofa and picking up the issue of Playboy that just happens to be there. "Who would have thought one of the best interviews with me would be in Playboy?"

She thumbs through the pages. "See, it's a really good picture of me," she says holding up what is, yes, a really striking photograph. "The whole interview is terrific. I'm really pleased."

She smiles for a moment and then tosses the magazine to the sofa.

"I hope I won't hate yours. I won't, will I?"

No wonder Sciorra didn't stand a chance in "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle." Or Tom Cruise, for that matter, in "Risky Business," when De Mornay transfixed the pubescent high schooler with her call-girl cool and introduced him to the finer points of Chicago's mass transit system.

It was her first film, made when De Mornay was just 19, and while most recall the 1983 comedy as Cruise's rocket-launcher, it also propelled the unknown actress on her own, albeit less-meteoric, career playing elegant, sultry ciphers, women who almost always get their man.

"I had only been auditioning for six months--which is nothing--when I got the female lead in a feature film that went on to become a monster hit," De Mornay says. "I got a nine-year ride on one film."

With her Veronica Lake-in-Wonderland looks--the blond bangs, porcelain doll features and storybook blue eyes--De Mornay parlayed her "Risky Business" renown into a decade's worth of visually arresting if wildly varying women. She was the sweetly prim bride in "The Trip to Bountiful"; the lusty inmate in "And God Created Woman"; the ambitious singer in "The Slugger's Wife," and the sorrowful ex-wife in "Backdraft."