She was raised eating potatoes, boys teased her that she had 'stick legs', and
when she first applied for a US visa she was rejected – amid fears over her Muslim roots.
Today 29-year-old Irina Shayk, once seen as a 'spotty village girl', is the talk of
America as she steals passionate kisses with Hollywood heartthrob Bradley
Cooper.
But her road from a bleak Russian industrial backwater to fame as a swimwear and lingerie model was fraught with setbacks, just as it was
aided by astonishingly lucky breaks, one of them at a bus stop.
Daily Mail Online has explored her roots in the grim industrial Urals region nudging Siberia to hear from those who knew her, and her extraordinary life story.
She once said of her polluted birthplace Yemanzhelinsk, where she lived in grinding poverty as Russia's casino
economy collapsed under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s: 'It's a beautiful place – if you wear a mask.
'It's a mining town, but all the collieries have shut already.'
Among the extraordinary aspects of her journey to fame as a model is how she overcame – as a vulnerable and gawky 14-year-old – the sudden and traumatic death of her beloved father Valery Shaykhlislamov, her real family name.
A coal miner, his death in his 40s from an acute lung disease plunged the family into near penury, but he bequeathed her one invaluable asset: her
distinctive Tatar looks.
'My father was dark skinned, because he was Tatar,' she explained. 'Sometimes Tatars can look Brazilian. I get my light eyes from my mother.'
Another is her formidable paternal grandmother – now also sadly dead, a bomb-dodging teenage military spy under Stalin who was among the 'liberators' of Nazi Berlin 70 years ago at the climax of the Second World War.
She was a role model who Irina called 'my angel', allowing her to dream her dreams of escaping from the ruins of Communism, a goal she always knew she would achieve.
Then there is the way her ethnic Russian mother by chance saw a notice for a local 'beauty school' on a bus stop wall.
She took Irina's sister Tatyana, now 31, but next door was a model agency.
The eagle-eyed staff spotted not Tatyana but her younger sister Irina hanging around, and knew at once someone special had fallen into their laps.
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