Mariska Hargitay adds some sex appeal to the sex-crimes division on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
BY GREG EMMANUEL

MARISKA HARGITAY DANCES playfully around a column in the middle of a spacious Soho loft. "I can sing showtunes," she brags, tipping her head back like a Broadway diva. Once around the pole and she's off: to the bathroom to feast her eyes on an inlaid-tile fish mosaic ("This is so cool"), and then to the small, bohemian-style bedroom with a bed on the floor ("It's so groovy!"). She winds up her spirited trip in the back of the apartment, where picture windows look across an alley at other funky Soho pads. Noticing the loft's proximity to the surrounding buildings, she says, "It'll be like this," then flashes a smile and playfully lifts her black turtleneck sweater�exposing a bit of herself to what could be her new neighbors. The Los Angeles-born actress has been living in New York City for only nine months, but she's already treating the place like her own studio backlot.Hargitay's critically acclaimed role as Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit brought her here. Since July, she's been renting a place on the Upper West Side, but now that SVU is approaching bona fide-hit status, it's pretty clear that she'll be in town for a while. As a result, she's spending this chilly Saturday afternoon looking for a more permanent dwelling.

"I love this city," she says between real-estate-broker appointments. The proclamation isn't necessary; the fact that this dark-haired beauty feels at home in New York is abundantly clear. Case in point: "There's ABC," she says, peering down 17th Street at the mother of all home stores. "There's nothing wrong with popping in!" She quickens her pace�continuing her impersonation of the Energizer Bunny.

Watching Hargitay cruise about the city contrasts with the way millions of Americans see her every Friday night on NBC, as the crafty, collected Detective Benson. On the show, Hargitay, 36, plays�alongside partner Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni)�one of a team of NYC sex-crimes cops, poking into ghastly corners of the city as she chases down stalkers, rapists and murderers. A dirty little spin-off of the ultra successful Law & Order original, SVU has the same respect for the intelligence and maturity of its viewers. As in real life, nasty things happen to nice people on this show. Hargitay's character, for example, is a product of the world she patrols�it was revealed early in the series that she was conceived when her mother was raped. Not surprisingly, the show's sicko-ridden storylines�an S&M-garbed married man is found dead with a banana in his butt, a guy who delivers oxygen to the elderly rapes his 80-plus-year-old customer�have at times affected the actress. In the beginning, Hargitay says, "I had a lot of nightmares."

"SIMMER DOWN NOW," Hargitay shouts to no one in particular. It's a line from a Saturday Night Live skit, and on the SVU set today, it's got cast and crew smiling. If you stepped onto this soundstage in North Bergen, NJ (squad-room interiors are shot here; outside scenes are shot on location throughout the city), you probably wouldn't peg Hargitay and company as the ones bringing some of the heaviest themes ever to primetime TV. In between takes for an upcoming episode about a television news reporter (played by Jennifer Esposito) who has been raped, the actors goof off like a bunch of fifth graders with a substitute teacher. Hargitay jumps on Meloni's back; he playfully grabs her butt. Later on, she gives costar Richard Belzer (the droll Homicide stowaway Detective Munch) a shoulder massage�it's a very physical group. "Pictures up, people. People!" Hargitay yells in a voice louder than the director's. In a heartbeat, everyone is back in character, ready to talk about perps and crime scenes. It's a little schizophrenic.

"We alleviate the pressure that way�comic relief," says Hargitay. This coping mechanism may have some early origins. The youngest daughter of Hungarian bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay and celebrity pinup Jayne Mansfield, the actor hardly knew her famous mother, who died in a car accident when she was three years old (Mariska and two older brothers were asleep in the backseat when the crash occurred). Hargitay was so young, she has no memory of the tragedy. Now that she's the subject of magazine stories herself, she prefers to keep the focus on her own career. One thing she will say is that her mother's fame triggered in her an early desire not to be an actor. "[Growing up,] people were telling me I should be an actress, because of my mom," she says. "I was like, 'No!�which part of no don't you understand?'" Hargitay claims that her L.A. upbringing was decidedly nonshowbiz (her dad was remarried to an airline stewardess a few years after Mansfield's death). "We traveled a lot. I got out of school on June 7th, and by June 8th I'd be on a plane to Europe, and I'd hang out there all summer." She spent summers at camp in her father's native Hungary, or in other cities across Europe. (The result: She speaks Hungarian, Italian and French fluently.)

At her Catholic high school in L.A., Hargitay excelled in swimming, cross country and basketball, and participated in student government along with other clubs. During her junior year, a friend convinced her to try out for the school play. She got the part, and from the first rehearsal she was hooked. "It was a natural fit for me. I felt so comfortable on stage," she says. The next year, she went out for the lead in another production, and when she was chosen, it pretty much sealed the deal.

Hargitay majored in theater at UCLA; after graduation, she hit the hard road to become a professional actor. The usual job-mix followed: horror movies (1985's Ghoulies), canceled television series (Downtown in 1986 and Tequila and Banetti in 1992) and "hooker-at-bar roles" (1995's Leaving Las Vegas). Hargitay's first break came in 1997 when she landed a recurring role on ER as the pretty-but-needy desk clerk, Cynthia Hooper. At the audition, she recalls, "the actor Gods were smiling." For the scene, the character had to search through her purse for a r�sum� that she just didn't have; Hargitay came prepared with a bag full of junk. "I even had a phone in there," she remembers. "Not a cell phone�a real phone."

During the 1997-98 ER season, Hargitay appeared as the sweetly manipulative Hooper, who eventually got romantic with Anthony Edwards' Dr. Mark Greene. She says it was her best job to date, not just because it was on the most-watched drama on television, but because of the on-set relationships that developed. Hargitay became close with Maria Bello (who played Dr. Anna Del Amico); the two remain good friends, and have even vacationed together in Hawaii.

When you're hanging out with Hargitay, the subject of friends comes up often. (After receiving a call on her cell phone during her apartment hunt, she gushes, "That was my best friend from kindergarten!") The actor says she's developed strong bonds with her SVU castmates, especially costar Meloni. "We really just hit it off," Meloni confirms. "We walked in [to the screen test] laughing. We said, 'Hold on a second,' and I finished telling her a story. The producers were like 'Wow, nice chemistry.'"

"She was this burst of incredible positive energy that I was suspicious of at first," says Belzer, sounding not unlike the conspiracy-obsessed Munch. "I thought, She can't be like this all the time. And it turns out that she's generally that way." The show's executive producer, Robert Palm, agrees: "She just kind of takes over the room, in the very best sense." Away from the set, Hargitay clings to an amazing community of friends that, when described, comes off sounding remarkably like the premise for a new Melrose Place. Back when she lived in L.A., Hargitay became unusually close with her neighbors�a group that includes a lawyer, a singer, a computer technician and a medical-equipment salesman. "We joke how it's not a neighborhood�it's a way of life," she says. "My neighbors pick me up at the airport...we travel together. We just clicked."

When she moved to New York, she had a similar experience; Hargitay quickly became chums with her Upper West Side brownstone mates, who include a computer guy and a pharmaceutical salesperson. The group has dinner parties ("I love cooking," she says. "I'm an Italian mama deep down") and get together to watch her show. "If I move to the loft downtown," she says, referring to the Soho apartment, "I know I'll wind up being friends with the guy who lives upstairs."

Of course, moving to NYC hasn't been that easy. Hargitay had to leave her parents and her five brothers and sisters�plus the three-story Spanish-style home her father built, the feel of which, she's quickly realizing, is going to be impossible to re-create here. "It was like leaving the womb," she says of her move from L.A. "When I first got here, I moved into a friend's apartment, and I didn't fully understand what it means to live in a five-story walkup. I had seven suitcases�everything I own. My cabdriver says, 'How you gonna do it?' And I'm crying." The next day, she couldn't find a cab to take her to work. "You know how you see in the movies when the car goes by and sprays you? All these clich�s, I get 'em."

NOW THAT SHE'S HERE TO STAY, Hargitay is faced with the struggles of the prototypical New Yorker: working too hard, having no time for a relationship (still single, she says she's been on one date since she moved here last summer) and the dreaded apartment search. And yes, even TV stars struggle with those ridiculous real-estate prices. The places she's looking at are all priced under a million dollars (though not by much), and she expresses some concern about covering the costs.

But New York has been in the back of Hargitay's mind for such a long time, nothing is going to stop her now. "My grandmother lives in Mamaroneck, so I've been coming here for Christmas ever since I was a little girl. I've wanted to move here since I was ten," she explains. When she decided she wanted to become an actor, Hargitay would come to NYC to see as much theater as possible. Last April, she took such a trip, and afterwards told her managers�in no uncertain terms�that she was moving here. Soon after, fate intervened: Hargitay auditioned for the role of Detective Benson, and a week later, she got the job.

Of course, that job means spending 15-hour days immersed in heinous subject matter�maybe not the sexiest job on TV. But Hargitay wouldn't want it any other way. "I'm living every ten-year-old boy's fantasy," she says. "The other day, Chris and I had this big scene where we had to pull out our guns, and I was thinking, Here we are in New York City�a place where every actor wants to be�and we are literally playing cops and robbers. How great is that?"