Crossover Dream Comes True : Movies/TV: Cuban refugee Mayte Vilan comes to the U.S. and takes an acting class. Now she’s on big and small screens.

At 23, Mayte Vilan’s life reads like a movie treatment.

A Cuban refugee who arrived in the United States eight years ago unable to speak a word of English, she is currently on both the big screen and the small screen--playing a police officer working with James Woods in the film “The Specialist” and portraying one of the crime solvers in Aaron Spelling’s syndicated TV series “Robin’s Hoods.”

Spelling caught a glimpse of Vilan in a small guest role on another series “and said, ‘This is the girl’--and when he says that, it’s a done deal,” says “Robin’s Hoods” producer John B. Moranville. “Let’s face it. If there is one thing Aaron Spelling does better than anyone else, it’s casting.”

But getting this far wasn’t quite so simple. “Her life and what she’s done, it’s like some turn-of-the-century, come-to-America-and-find-success story,” Moranville declares.

“It was pretty rough getting used to a whole new country,” Vilan acknowledges, recalling her earliest days in Miami, where her family settled after leaving Cuba. “I had to learn to deal with a lot of new stresses.”

Even she is amazed at what she has accomplished.

“Even in Cuba, I wanted to act, but by the time I arrived here, I had to put away that dream and lock it up,” she says. “I thought I had to study something more practical and earn good money and help my family. I had to say over and over, ‘This is just a dream and face reality.’ ”

But as a psychology student at Miami Dade Community College, she heard of an acting program within the school--Prometeo--run by a Spanish-speaking teacher.

“I would take my regular classes during the day and then go to acting classes at night,” she recalls. It took one class for her to realize her true calling: “The first day I got there, it was it for me.”

When an Argentine telenovela (soap opera) production company arrived in Miami and began testing Spanish-speaking actresses, Vilan’s teacher gathered her class together and sent them to audition.

To Vilan’s surprise, she got a call back. “They asked what I’d done professionally and it was nothing. I had to give them a snapshot when they asked for a head shot.” Despite her lack of experience, she got the role and spent 11 months on the telenovela “El Magnate.”

Plays in both Spanish and English followed--”It was very exciting and challenging doing my first role in English”--then a Latin sitcom, “Corte Tropical,” and two more telenovelas , “Guadalupe” and “Marielena.” She also did a stint as a weather reporter on a Spanish-language news show.

But Vilan was determined to try her hand at more English-speaking roles. “The Latin soaps set me off with a good foot. I just wanted my career to take off. Of course, Hollywood was my ultimate goal.”

That was achieved when director Luis Llosa cast her in “The Specialist.”

“She was very professional,” Llosa says. “She has tremendous possibilities. She combines this Latin beauty and sexiness and has all the good talent to match. She can also speak perfect English to mainstream into any film.”

And what could be more mainstream than a series from one of television’s most successful producers? On “Robin’s Hoods,” Vilan plays Maria, one of five former “hoods” who now fight crime under the guidance of former assistant district attorney Brett Robin, played by Linda Purl.

“Mayte adds this international flair to the show and she’s a real knockout,” producer Moranville says. “The thing I like about her is that she’s actually very innocent and vulnerable off camera. She’s not as hard-edged as her character.”

Vilan, recently relocated to Los Angeles, hopes her two current roles will help change the tide of Latino stereotyping: “It’s been changing, the way Latinos are portrayed. Hollywood took the loudest (most obvious) stereotypes of drug dealers and housekeepers and perpetuated it. But it was just out of ignorance.”

She also hopes that Hollywood will soon distinguish between the different Latino cultures. “We may speak the same language, but with different accents and different backgrounds,” she notes.

Meantime, she’s trying to savor what has happened to her. “This is a great and wonderful beginning for me,” Vilan says excitedly. “It doesn’t happen to everybody and I know it. This year has been like ‘Boom!’--an explosion for me, so many great things. I guess you just can’t stop destiny.”

* “Robin’s Hoods” airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on KCOP-TV Channel 13.