As a child, Izabella Scorupco silently watched her loud-mouth cousin hog all the attention at family gatherings. As an adult, the cover model-turned-pop diva-turned-screen siren never goes unnoticed.Scorupco was born on June 4, 1970, in Bialystock, an industrial town in northeast Poland, to Madgelena and Lech Scorupco. Her mother, a doctor, and her father, a jazz musician, divorced when she was one (her father died 18 years later). In 1978, Scorupco and her mother relocated to a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. There, Scorupco took various singing and acting courses and began composing her own plays, which she would bully her classmates into performing. From ages 12 to 13, she visited a Catholic convent to study French. Though she claims to have spent most of her time there frequenting nightclubs, French is one of several languages that she speaks fluently.Scorupco's big break came at 17 when Swedish film director Staffan Hildebrand stopped at her school while on a promotional tour. Determined to get the filmmaker's attention, Scorupco bombarded Hildebrand with questions and then convinced him that the plot of his next film — about a child of divorce who wants to travel north to see her father — mirrored her own life experience. Impressed, Hildebrand cast her in the film, 1988's Ingen Kan