Is There A Number Other Than ‘6’ For Her?

She should know after today. It’s a big question, the one that has dominated her life for the past decade, and now it’s going to be answered.

After today, will “Girl 6” be Girl 1? Or at least Girl 2 or 3?

That is, after today will Theresa Randle, a small thing in some big movies and the best thing in some bad movies, be an old-fashioned star? Spike Lee’s “Girl 6,” starring her and only her, opens all over America today. She is in every scene, her heart and emotions drive the movie, her charisma fills it. If she doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work.

In a film culture suddenly rich in female black talent - with Angela Bassett and Halle Berry up front, Alfre Woodard and Anna Deveare Smith closing fast and Loretta Devine, Lola Rochon and Jada Pinkett just behind them - will Randle move up to the head of the parade?

Randle, 28, and a mere slip of a woman with doe eyes, hopes so and is honest about her ambition.

“I pray that will happen,” she says. “Basically, I’m just sitting back hoping Hollywood will take notice.”

She has certainly paid her dues. She was in Abel Ferrara’s “The King of New York” and in “Sugar Hill,” opposite Wesley Snipes. More recently she was in “Bad Boys,” playing Martin Lawrence’s wife; her credits go back to “The Five Heartbeats” and “Jungle Fever” and “Beverly Hills Cop III” and “Malcolm X.” Her next film stars her opposite Michael Jordan; it’s a part-animated feature called “Space Jams.”

But for now, she is at the absolute center of the first Spike Lee film that isn’t about race at all but phone sex, and which is certain to be controversial.

How does a nice person like Theresa Randle - and Theresa Randle is extremely nice - end up in a movie like this? She’s not even sure herself.

“When I got the script,” she recalls, “I had to put it down and take a big breath. The dialogue frightened me. A red light went on. ‘No way I’m going to do this,’ I thought. ‘I’ve been a good girl,’ ” she says with a laugh, and it’s true.

Somewhat like the pre-“Leaving Las Vegas” Elizabeth Shue, Randle has always played girls-next-door, paragons of virtue, patience and innocence.

She’s never vamped or camped, slutted or strutted, shook her bootie for the man.

“I didn’t want to do it just to do it,” she recounts, smiling shyly. “I had big reservations. But I have to say the original script was a lot more explicit.”

The movie, which makes provocative points about the nature of exploitation in both show biz and the seamier porn or near-porn industry, watches as a young actress, humiliated and rebuffed by the industry, signs on as a phone sex provider for a posh service. Ultimately, she discovers she likes it: It’s liberating, she bonds with some of her customers, she comes to learn more about herself than her acting could have ever permitted and she leaves the world a stronger, better person.

Randle still lives next door to her mother in Los Angeles, where she was born, and she’s not from the fast lane of that fast town.

In fact, everything about her seems not big town but small town, a young woman committed to the idea of being good rather than getting ahead. She’s about as down to earth and sincere as anyone in the business.

But then the actress in her delivers up a look that says, “Honey, you would not believe what goes on.”

The movie features a continual parade of celebs as phone-sex users or sellers, including Richard Belzer and Peter Berg as addicts to the stuff, Madonna as one of the sleazier operators of a service, Berry as herself, John Turturro as an agent, Quentin Tarantino as a nasty version of himself, Ron Silver as a director, Naomi Campbell as another phone-sex provider.

“It warms your heart to know that people will work with someone they don’t know,” she says, “and that they saw value in material that I saw value in.”