‘Ski Patrol’ Via Poland

In her native Poland, Tess Foltyn “dreamed in brown and gray.”

“You do, because it’s such a low-key and very sad life over there,” said the model-cum-actress who prefers using just her first name and makes her movie debut in the new dopes-on-the-slopes comedy “Ski Patrol.”

“I am not a big potato. I’m a small potato yet,” she says, “but I’m living in the ultimate country in the world, and I am happy.”

Born in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), she grew up in a well-to-do household. She was trained in music and studied in Vienna, where she was when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981. She sought asylum at the U.S. Embassy there.

Getting an American visa took months. “I had no money,” she recalls, “because I could only take out with me about $150 to pay for my education. I was a bum on the street for a while. I could only communicate with my parents by the mail, and this was censored. It was a very depressing time.”

She worked different jobs before distant relatives in the United States agreed to sponsor her. She settled first in New York, where a friend got her to try modeling.

“To me, beautiful is Grace Kelly,” she says. “I have this hard face, like a female Arnold Schwarzenegger. Besides, I was an ugly kid and a late bloomer, so I felt very insecure about it.”

She made the agency rounds anyway. At 5-foot-8, she was told she was too short to work in New York. That prompted her move to Los Angeles two years ago, where her modeling career took off. She broke into commercials with a Miller beer spot.

She also started doing stand-up comedy and auditioning for film and TV parts. “Either my accent was no good or my face was too overwhelming, or they wanted me to take off my clothes. . . . I come from a Catholic family and my parents would probably die if I did. And the notorious couch castings and all? I’m not into that.”