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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 Valeriy 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.[DailyMail]

Now she is a name known  around the world but this glamorous model has admitted in Russia to her hand-to-mouth background when she lived in a cramped ground floor flat in a typical apartment block in Yemanzhelinsk, decorated Soviet-style.

'We were very poor,' she said.

'After school my sister and I helped our mom in the garden. We grew potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, not for fun - but to eat.'

She also acknowledged: 'Actually I wanted to become a journalist, but no matter who I imagined myself to be in the future, somehow I was sure: I would leave my hometown. I felt it was my destiny.'

Those who remained in this dour south Urals backwater - population 30,216 - confirm her account, and remember her mother Olga, working hard as a music teacher, and taking on a second job, to make ends meet.

Irina had extra classes at a music school - she played the piano getting excellent grades - in addition to her normal education.

Childhood friend Denis Salomatov affirmed: 'These were the tough 1990s. We ate bread, potatoes, and drank juice from 3-liter jugs.'

A classmate who wanted to remain anonymous remembered: 'It was a world apart from what she knows now - and her glamorous life with Bradley Cooper by her side.

'Back then, we didn't have enough money for essentials, let alone luxuries. But we all lived like this, eating only basics.