Coté de Pablo

All Is VANITIES ... Nothing Is Fair.

AGE: 31. PROVENANCE: Santiago, Chile ... WHENCE SHE TOOK HER TALENTS TO SOUTH BEACH: At age 10, well before achieving fame as the intense former Mossad agent Ziva David on CBS's stealthily massive crime procedural NC/S, de Pablo immigrated to Miami with her mother, Maria Olga Fernandez, a Spanish-language TV chat star. "I was very un-Miami," de Pablo says. "It wasn't until I found my niche in performing-arts high school that I really said, 'This is my tribe.'" SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK PEOPLE, ARE YOU LISTENING? De Pablo's acting bug took her to Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, where she fell in with a show-people crowd that included future pros Matthew Bomer (USA's White Collar) and Zachary Quinto (formerly of NBC's Heroes, now of the starship Enterprise). "We still laugh about having to do these terrible routines," says de Pablo, who maintains highbrow, or at least higher-brow, ambitions. "My dream would be to be in a Merchant Ivory film with a corset. The irony in all of this is that I'm playing an Israeli woman who goes around kicking butt."

KRISTA SMITH