Who is Hugh's girl?

The juxtaposition could hardly be more pronounced. Kasia Komorowicz was a VIP guest this month at the most feted West End film premiere of the year, for Richard Curtis's new movie Love Actually. She was there because this unknown and secretive woman has been the "on-off" girlfriend for three and a half years of the film's main star, Hugh Grant.

Indeed, Grant and Kasia - a striking 30-year-old Polish blonde - spent most of the exclusive after-show party amorously and publicly entwined. She also chatted like an old friend to other celebrities such as Colin Firth and Emma Thompson.

In short, she is "Hugh's new girl", an overnight tabloid star and the emotional support to whom, say friends, Grant has consistently turned since the break-up of his 13-year relationship with Liz Hurley.

But in an ugly Communist-built housing estate in the graffitiscarred and dingy Polish coastal city of 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 not understand all of this, the celebrity. I know her only as my wonderful daughter, the one who inherited her beautiful looks from her mother."

Has he even heard of Hugh Grant? He shakes his head. "No, he is no one here. I've never met him." Beginning to cook breakfast in his shabby home, he continues: "But if he is with my daughter..." He stops and tugs at his white, droopy moustache. "Well, she is a very beautiful girl."

And a lucky one. Kasia would have remained a nobody were it not for Grant, 43. Her story is surprising and rather admirable: a girl born under Communism who, with her quick wit, brains and - needless to say, beauty - has transformed herself.

The foppish film star and the Polish blonde first met in London through friends after Kasia- short for Katarzyna - had left Poland in the late-Nineties and landed a job with the United Nations, ultimately being posted to London, where she fell in with an international, Euro-ish crowd.

It could, perhaps should, have been a film script. In Curtis's hit film, Grant, in the role of a divorced Prime Minister, falls for an East End secretary in Number 10, played by Martine McCutcheon.

In real life, Kasia is of a different class. There is, say friends, no question as to her intelligence, or her discretion. Beyond the inquisitive eyes of the paparazzi, she managed to keep her sporadic affair with Grant a secret.

It's not difficult to see her attraction. "She's always smiling," a friend told the Evening Standard. "She's one of those who is just good to have around." A former neighbourhood friend in Gdynia was less subtle: "Boys were always interested in her. Definitely."

In Poland, her teachers and friends attest to her intelligence, and her charm. "She was a friendly and sympathetic-girl," says Lidia Bujnowska, a teacher at the local school. "She was always keen to have a good time. But she was great at her studies. Most certainly. I never knew what had happened to her 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 grinding, impoverished life in Gdynia. "She was looking for her place in life," he said. "She was trying to find out what she should do with herself. Even then, she dreamed of moving to England. I suppose, now, her dream has come more than true."

You could hardly begrudge her it. Gdynia is a soulless, dreary porttown on the Baltic coast. It comically boasts of being "the Cannes of Poland" because every September it hosts the Polish Film Festival.

As a teenager, Kasia witnessed the historic events which saw Poland wrench itself from beneath the Iron Curtain and Communist rule.

But her country's hard- won freedom did not offer enough incentive to stay in Poland. So she began to work to better herself, spending hours at the kitchen table in her parents' flat in Stawna Street - two rooms and not much else - struggling with her studies.

After graduating in Management and Economics in 1995, Kasia won a scholarship to study abroad. She first went to New York and then to London, where she worked for a short time as a translator and computer analyst for the UN.

The most tumultuous event in her life occurred in her twenties when, in deeply Catholic Poland, her parents divorced. It was, say friends, a pivotal moment: her mother remains in the flat where Kasia grew up but her father, a rather lonely figure, ekes out a paltry living teaching children chess in a nearby youth club and lives alone.

Her friends in Poland are amazed by her new-found celebrity. "She hasn't forgotten us, though," one says. "She was here a month ago, for one of our friend's birthdays. And we protect her in the same way that we tried to protect this country from the Russians."

They won't say if she spoke about Hugh. And Kasia recently said that "passion has cooled" between her and Grant. But, contrary to some newspaper reports, they do remain close. She wants, she says, to pursue a career in information technology, possibly in the Middle East, even Iraq. "The only way to build up a proper bond is to be friends first," she says of Grant.

How different it all 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 story is part of the port city's folklore. In Polish, the ship was named Batory. In English, it was known as the Lucky Ship.

As any woman will testify, there's no question that Kasia Komorowicz has been more than lucky herself.