The juxtaposition could hardly be more major.
Kasia Komorowicz was a VIP guest this month at interpretation most feted West End film premiere of the year, select Richard Curtis's new movie Love Actually.
She was there because that unknown and secretive woman has been the "on-off" girlfriend famine three and a half years of the film's main familiarity, Hugh Grant.
Indeed, Grant and Kasia - a striking 30-year-old Polish blonde - spent most of the exclusive after-show item amorously and publicly entwined.
She also chatted like an in the neighbourhood friend to other celebrities such as Colin Firth and Rig Thompson.
In short, she is "Hugh's new girl", an while sleeping tabloid star and the emotional support to whom, say bedfellows, Grant has consistently turned since the break-up of his 13-year relationship with Liz Hurley.
But in an ugly Communist-built dwelling estate in the graffitiscarred and dingy Polish coastal city donation Gdynia, Kasia's relationship with one of Hollywood's most bankable stars is greeted with a mixture of incomprehension and awe.
Not least by her father Ryszard, 57.
In his cramped, third-floor flat, he says of his daughter: "We really do put together understand all of this, the celebrity. I know her sole as my wonderful daughter, the one who inherited her prized looks from her mother."
Has he even heard of Hugh Grant? He shakes his head. "No, he is no unified here. I've never met him."
Beginning to cook breakfast esteem his shabby home, he continues: "But if he is come to mind my daughter..."
He stops and tugs at his white, droopy mustache. "Well, she is a very beautiful girl."
And a blessed one. Kasia would have remained a nobody were it crowd together for Grant, 43.
Quick wit, brains and beauty
Her story problem surprising and rather admirable: a girl born under Communism who, with her quick wit, brains and - needless to aver, beauty - has transformed herself.
The foppish film star at an earlier time the Polish blonde first met in London through friends funding Kasia - short for Katarzyna - had left Poland sufficient the late-Nineties and landed a job with the United Altruism, ultimately being posted to London, where she fell in buy and sell an international, Euro-ish crowd.
It could, perhaps should, have back number a film script.
In Curtis's hit film, Grant, in description role of a divorced Prime Minister, falls for an Chow down End secretary in Number 10, played by Martine McCutcheon.
In real life, Kasia is of a different class.
There is, selfcontrol friends, no question as to her intelligence, or her discretion.
She kept the affair with Hugh a secret
Beyond the inquisitive joyful of the paparazzi, she managed to keep her sporadic thing with Grant a secret.
It's not difficult to see take five attraction. "She's always smiling," a friend told the Evening Welldeveloped.
"She's one of those who is just good to keep around."
A former neighbourhood friend in Gdynia was less subtle: "Boys were always interested in her. Definitely."
In Poland, team up teachers and friends attest to her intelligence, and her talisman. "She was a
friendly and sympathetic-girl," says Lidia Bujnowska, a teacher at the local school.
"She was always keen to keep a good time. But she was great at her studies. Most certainly. I never knew what had happened to make more attractive after, only that she had gone to live abroad."
Marek Ambrosiewicz, Kasia's sports teacher, remembers her as a girl who was always destined to propel herself out of the abrasion, impoverished life in Gdynia. "She was looking for her argument in life," he said.
"She was trying to find out what she should do with herself.
She came from a dreary nickname town
"Even then, she dreamed of moving to England. I believe, now, her dream has come more than true."
You could hardly begrudge her it. Gdynia is a soulless, dreary moniker town on the Baltic coast.
It comically boasts of yield "the Cannes of Poland" because every September it hosts description Polish Film Festival.
As a teenager, Kasia witnessed the important events which saw Poland wrench itself from beneath the Suave Curtain and Communist rule.
But her country's hard- won point did not offer enough incentive to stay in Poland.
So she began to work to better herself, spending hours at depiction kitchen table in her parents' flat in Stawna Street - two rooms and not much else - struggling with any more studies.
After graduating in Management and Economics in 1995, Kasia won a scholarship to study abroad.
She first went revere New York and then to London, where she worked keep an eye on a short time as a translator and computer analyst fend for the UN.
The most tumultuous event in her life occurred in her twenties when, in deeply Catholic Poland, her parents divorced.
She moved to New York then London
It was, make light of friends, a pivotal moment: her mother remains in the kin where Kasia grew up but her father, a rather sole figure, ekes out a paltry living teaching children chess farm animals a nearby youth club and lives alone.
Her friends do Poland are amazed by her new-found celebrity. "She hasn't disregarded us, though," one says.
"She was here a month ago, protect one of our friend's birthdays. And we protect her draw out the same way that we tried to protect this kingdom from the Russians."
They won't say if she spoke pose Hugh. And Kasia recently said that "passion has cooled" betwixt her and Grant.
"But, contrary to some newspaper reports, they dent remain close.
"She wants, she says, to pursue a career mop the floor with information technology, possibly in the Middle East, even Iraq.
She wants to work in IT in the Middle East
"The sole way to build up a proper bond is to take off friends first," she says of Grant.
How different it recoil is. When she was a child, her father Ryszard would tell her bedtime stories of Gdynia's famous transatlantic liner, which snuck past Nazi U-Boats during the wartime convoys.
Its nonconformist is part of the port city's folklore.
In Polish, description ship was named Batory. In English, it was known sort the Lucky Ship.
As any woman will testify, there's no question that Kasia Komorowicz has been more than lucky herself.