"I love her voice," says Steven Bochco (producer of Brooklyn South/NYPD Blue), who first saw Butler in a cameo as a junkie on NYPD Blue. "I wish I had her voice. Yancy has this natural strength and authority. And she's beautiful without being cupcakey. She makes an entirely credible police officer."

Her own background is decidedly artsy. Butler grew up in Greenwich Village, the only child of Joe and Leslie Butler, who divorced when she was 12 but remain close friends. Boomers may recall that Joe was the drummer for the Lovin' Spoonful, the '60s band that had such hits as "Do You Believe in Magic?" and "Daydream." The band broke up just before Butler's birth, and after a stint in the musical "Hair," Joe found work in construction. Her grandmother was a Broadway actress, and both her grandfather and mother were in theater management. Butler herself studied dance at the Joffrey and Ailey schools and acting at HB Studios and Sarah Lawrence College, where she graduated in 1991.

As for her streetwise persona, it's Joe Butler who provides the revealing information: Yancy once whacked a boy over the head with a tennis racket after he'd tried to do the same to her. She was banned from eighth-grade graduation after brawling with a classmate. And she's universally friendly. And she never gives up. "Yancy has always been tenacious," says Joe, currently on tour with a reunited Spoonful (sans John Sebastian). "If you're the dog who eats Yancy's homework, you're a dead dog."

Although her family warned her away from a life in the arts and insisted on a college degree, even her father had to concede she had the right stuff. "It's hard to be objective when it's your own kid," he says. "But I saw the video of one of her college plays and thought, 'Wow. She has tremendous charisma.'" Still, when Butler started acting professionally, it was not out of a deep creative longing. "I was too short to model," recalls Butler, who studied child psychology as a backup. "So I turned to acting to help pay off my student loans."