You can take the girl out of Jersey--but only if she really wants to go. "I like the place," shrugs Michelle Rodriguez, who was recently seen throwing some serious punches in last year's critic's darling Girlfight.

If you tell Michelle Rodriguez that she hits like a girl, she'll probably say, "Thank you." But then again, she could tear you from limb to limb.

As legend has it, when director Karyn Kusama was casting the lead for her directorial debut, Girlfight, she wanted to find a young woman who would radiate the powerful, surly charisma of the young Marlon Brando. Her search for an actor with this enviable but elusive quality ended when Michelle Rodriguez, a 20-year-old Latina whose previous experience was limited to work as an extra, answered an ad in Backstage magazine that Kusama had posted.

Of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, Rodriguez was born in Bell County, TX, on July 12, 1978. She moved around throughout her childhood and adolescence, living for a time in Texas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Jersey City, NJ.

The smell of grease paint; the roar of the engine. When Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez were approached to play the love interests of the street racers in the youth drama The Fast and the Furious, neither actress had a driver's licence. Rodriguez was one step ahead. "I'd been driving for a couple of years without a licence so it was just a matter of taking the proper exams," says the star of the independent film Girlfight.

Rodriguez's status as one of the year's New Hot Young Thangs on the Block was duly reflected by the attention she was subsequently paid in both the media and Hollywood. In the following year, her projects included Rob Cohen's The Fast and the Furious, an urban adrenaline extravaganza in which she played the tough girlfriend of a gang leader alongside Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Jordanna Brewster, and 3 A.M., a made-for-cable \\drama which cast her as a taxi driver and was screened at the Sundance Festival.

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