Watch Kimberly Foster ease out of the driver's seat of her red Porsche and you'd think she really lives the role she plays in "Dallas" (CBS-TV, 8 p.m.).
But in conversation, it's quickly apparent that the 28-year-old blonde is no real-life Michelle Stevens."Michelle doesn't have a limit on how far she'll go with anything or anybody," says Ms. Foster. "She's very smart and devious and conniving. She lies, too. But I think she still has some vulnerability."
She herself is vulnerable, Ms. Foster says, but that's the only part of her character's description that fits.
"I tell little white lies - not to you, of course," she says, laughing. "But I have limits. I have this country girl still inside me. I want people to be honest and up front and I like people who have their feet on the ground."
Ms. Foster grew up in rural Booneville, Ark., a town with only one stoplight.
"It was teeny," she says of her hometown. "But you don't really miss what you don't know about. I rode horses a lot, I was a cheerleader and I played on the basketball team. And my mom liked to travel a lot. Every summer we went somewhere - Europe or California or something. So I think I got the best of both worlds."
Ms. Foster, whose lanky 5-foot-8 frame and creamy complexion were ideal for the modeling jobs she did before becoming an actress, finds the world of "Dallas" not all that different from small-town Arkansas.
"It's funny, the way the plots go," she said, reflecting on her first season with the show. "It's very much like a small town. Everybody knows everybody. Most of them are related somehow. Everybody knows everybody else's business. That can be good or bad - but it makes Michelle an interesting character.
"She's always trying to find out everyone else's business, but she has secrets going on with just about everybody, too. She has some pain in her heart. I think it's because she grew up in the shadow of her older sister."
If Ms. Foster talks about the "Dallas" scenario as if it were real, that's because it often feels real to her. Not only is she now a regular on the program, but she's been a fan since high school days.
"Everybody on the show is so good with their characters that they take on almost a real-life quality," she says. "There's a major difference between the characters and the actors who play them in almost every case. The walks, the accents are all different and that makes the characters much more authentic to me."
Even her own Michelle. While Ms. Foster has the same short "ragtop" haircut as her character, that's about all they have in common, she says. That and their taste in cars.
Where Michelle has had a bimbo-like look all season, wearing skimpy, slinky clothes that show off her body, Ms. Foster says "I'm almost a prude.
"But I can't let my own feelings get in the way of what Michelle does. Those clothes go side-by-side with everything she is. Michelle manipulates men, so she can't go around with flannel pajamas on. But she's getting a little more money and her clothes are getting better, too. I wouldn't lie, either, but Michelle does it all the time."
Ms. Foster also straightens out "Dallas" fans who feel vaguely as if they've seen her someplace before. They have.
She's the girl who sidles up and sings to the man shaving in a Shick razor commercial. She's done "huge humbers" of Diet Coke spots and others for Oldsmobile and Dentyne. She also has been a cover girl on several fashion magazines and appeared on the cover of TV Guide's season preview issue last fall.
But so far, being on "Dallas" is the highlight of her acting career.