Whether it’s dominatrix-style discipline in Vegas, high-society scheming in Newport Beach, or sneaking cigars through customs, Melinda Clarke is very good at being bad.

By Joan Tarshis

We first ran into Melinda Clarke when we interviewed cigar enthusiast Harry Humphries, the technical advisor on producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s very first TV series, “Soldier of Fortune, Inc.” On the show - sort of a “Have Gun, Will Travel” for the new world order - Melinda played Margo Vincent, a machine-gun-toting covert military operative who could render a man helpless at 10 paces with her glance - and then kill him with one shot.

Clarke has been one of Hollywood’s hottest chameleons, specializing in cartoonish seductresses and girls-next-door gone horribly wrong. She’s played a demonette in the comic book epic Spawn and an undead doll in Return of the Living Dead 3, and grew an organ only Gene Simmons could love in the Spanish horror film La Lengua Asesina (“The Killer Tongue”) - in other words, girls you don’t bring home to Mom unless you want Mom dead. Until recently, her most notable TV gig was the seductive Las Vegas dominatrix Lady Heather on two episodes of CBS’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” The character came teasingly close to whipping William Petersen into shape as his onscreen main-squeeze. Currently playing rich beach-nut society mom Julie Cooper on Fox’s runaway hit prime-time drama “The O.C.,” Melinda seems to be continuing in prime bad-girl form.

There is, of course, another side to Melinda, the side that’s closer to her actual persona, which - she’ll hate this - sort of is the girl-next-door. After all, she did begin her career as a young blind girl on the daytime soap “Days of Our Lives.” “My character was the preacher’s daughter and her name was Faith. That’s right; I was Blind Faith,” Melinda jokes. In the intervening years she has appeared on a variety of hit TV shows (“Nash Bridges,” “Enterprise,” “Seinfeld”) playing, if not always good girls, at least normal humans. She even had a semi-regular role as Detective Olivia Cahill on “The District.”

Happily married to actor/writer/director Ernie Mirich since 1997, the couple have a four-year-old daughter, Catherine Grace - who is still too young to play with mommy’s two mass-marketed toy action figures: her Spawn character Jessica Priest, and Amazon Velasca from the television series “Xena: Warrior Princess.”

We caught up with Melinda the morning before her 35th birthday, sitting in her husband’s office, looking typically sexy, casual and very regular in a pair of pajamas, playing her favorite role: wife and mother.