Hollywood loves a good courtroom drama, but if you want to see real legal drama, head to the Harris County courthouse and watch Kelly Siegler in action.

She is a feisty, fire-breathing prosecutor who believes you can’t be too slick or too smooth with a jury.

“You have to always be up front, sincere, tell it like it is, so the jury feels like, ‘that’s my girl, and I’m listening to what she has to say,’ so they believe you,” Siegler said.

She connects with jury’s with shoot from the hip, plain talk -- plain talk she got from growing up in tiny Blessing, Texas.

She graduated No. 1 in a high school class of 44.

She said it was that upbringing that has something to do with  the brash style she exhibits in court.

“Probably from being a hick, from being made fun of, being from Blessing, people telling me I talk funny, people laughing at me at UT,” she said. “Probably that kind of you know you think I’m stupid — I will show you how stupid I am.”

Call it the revenge of the hick. She graduated from UT in three years, went to law school, then interned in the district attorney’s office in 1987 and never left.

She has a 95 percent conviction rate in felony cases. Siegler, a wife and mother of two daughters, was drawn to prosecuting because she said they help people, and she likes to be where the action is.

“If you are going to be bored every day, what’s the point?” she said. “You need to find a different job.”

She prefers cold cases and has won all 15 she has prosecuted.

“It’s like a puzzle,” she said. “You have these pieces and these people from way back in time.”

Siegler recently won another cold case, the trial of David Temple. He was convicted of killing his pregnant wife nine years ago. It was a case built mostly on what’s in some boxes: circumstantial evidence. There were no witnesses, and there was no weapon.

She hasn’t lost a case in seven years, but don’t call her a star.

“Corny. Really corny, yeah,” she said.

She said there are better prosecutors in the DA’s office. That may be true, but few have her combination of substance and style.