Craig, Daniel

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Craig, Daniel

Actor

B orn March 2, 1968, in Chester, England; son of Tim (a bar manager) and Carol Olivia (a teacher) Craig; married Fiona Loudon (an actress; divorced); children: Ella (with Loudon). Education: With the National Youth Theater school, 1984-88; graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, 1991.

Addresses: Agent—ICM, Oxford House, 76 Oxford St., London W1N 0AX, England.

Career

A ctor in films, including: The Power of One, 1992; Obsession, 1997; Love is the Devil, 1998; Elizabeth, 1998; Love and Rage, 1998; The Trench, 1999; I Dreamed of Africa, 2000; Hotel Splendide, 2000; Some Voices, 2000; Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, 2001; The Road to Perdi-tion, 2002; The Mother, 2003; Sylvia, 2003; Enduring Love, 2004; Layer Cake, 2004; The Jacket, 2005; Munich, 2005; Casino Royale, 2006; Infamous, 2007; The Invasion, 2007; The Golden Compass, 2007. Television appearances include: Sharpe’s Eagle, Central Television, 1993; Our Friends in the North, BBC, 1996; Moll Flanders, Granada Television, 1996; Sword of Honour, Channel 4, 2001; Copenhagen, BBC, 2002. Stage appearances include: No Remission, Lyric Studio Ham-mersmith, London, England, 1992; Angels in America, Royal National Theater, London, 1993; The Rover, Women’s Playhouse Trust, London, 1996; Hurly Burly, Old Vic, London, 1997.

Awards: Best actor, Evening Standard British Film Awards, for Casino Royale, 2007.

Sidelights

L egions of devoted fans of the James Bond espionage-thriller movies were appalled when a relatively unknown British actor, Daniel Craig, was cast as the next action hero of the immensely successful, long-running film franchise. Craig’s blond hair and blue eyes seemed to make him an unlikely choice to play Bond, the British intelligence operative known as Agent 007, and the actor found himself the target of some intense sniping during the making of Casino Royale, his 2006 debut as Bond. Upon its release, however, Craig’s performance immediately put to rest any doubts over his suitability for the part, with a majority of critics hailing him as the best Bond since Sean Connery—the first actor to take the role—set a near-impossible benchmark of sophisticated, deadly on-screen cool for all subsequent Bonds to follow. Even the famously disdain-ful London media establishment had a hard time finding a flaw in Craig’s performance; the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw ventured that the actor may have actually surpassed Connery, noting that “Craig brings off cinema’s most preposterous role with in-souciant grit.”

Craig was born in 1968 in the walled English city of Chester, but grew up in Liverpool, a larger city to the north. His father ran a pub, and was later di- vorced from Craig’s mother, an art teacher who was active in Liverpool’s fringe-theater community. As a kid, Craig spent a great deal of time with his mother and her friends at the somewhat infamous Every-man Theatre, where the majority of the venue’s productions “involved walking around in the nude,” he told John-Paul Flintoff in a Sunday Times interview. His first stage experiences were in more standard works for the stage at school, like the musical Oliver!. He also loved the cinema, and the first James Bond movie he encountered on the big screen was 1973’s Live and Let Die, which his father took him to see.

A stage talent and a fearless rugby player but an admittedly poor student, Craig left school for good at the age of 16 with the intent of winning a place at a drama school.All of the prominent British academies rejected him, however, including the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Old Vic, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, all in London. In 1984 he managed to win a place at the National Youth Theatre, a performance company and actors’ training ground whose alumni include Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, and Orlando Bloom. A few years later, Craig re-applied to the Guildhall School and was accepted; fellow students there included Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes.

After graduating from Guildhall in 1991, Craig appeared in various London stage productions, and made his film debut the following year in The Power of One, a drama about apartheid-era South Africa. He also won parts in British television movies and series, with his breakout role coming in a highly acclaimed miniseries for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1996, Our Friends in the North. The story followed a quartet of friends across a 30year span of their lives in Newcastle and London; Craig was cast as the dissolute Geordie Peacock. The role led to a solid part in a 1998 art-house drama, Love Is the Devil, in which he played Georgie Dyer, a real-life petty criminal who became romantically attached to the painter Francis Bacon in the 1960s before meeting a tragic end.

Craig also appeared in the 1998 period drama Elizabeth alongside Cate Blanchett as the sixteenth-century English monarch. It would be the last time he took on such a role, explaining a few years later to Times of London journalist Jasper Rees that he wished to avoid “dressing up in costumes and pan-sying around. It doesn’t appeal to me. It never did. When I left drama school the only jobs were for boys in floppy fringes who went to Eton. I fitted in because I could do a slightly posh accent.” Instead, Craig was making a name for himself in small, independent, and often critically acclaimed films such as The Trench and Hotel Splendide while taking on the occasional, much more lucrative paycheck for roles like the archeologist Alex West in 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. He remained certain, however, of the ultimate direction of his career. “I have no hunger for Hollywood,” he told Glasgow Herald journalist Gavin Docherty. “I have got no sights set there. I like European films. We don’t make millions of [dollars]. Hollywood looks to Europe for clues. Because we make cheaper films with great actors who want to work with directors.”

One of those directors was a veteran of the London stage, Sam Mendes, who won an Academy Award for directing the 1999 feature film American Beauty. Mendes’ next Hollywood project was The Road to Perdition in 2002, and he cast Craig in a supporting role. Craig then won a coveted but controversial role as the British poet Ted Hughes in Sylvia in 2003, playing the husband of American poet Sylvia Plath with Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role. A year later, he starred in a little-seen but enthusiastically received drama called Layer Cake, as a London cocaine dealer who is midway up the sales chain and has managed to earn enough to retire. His more powerful bosses, however, pull him into a twisted mystery involving a missing debutante and a pil-fered drug shipment. Reviewing it in the Village Voice, Michael Atkinson found Layer Cake’s storyline ridiculously improbable and asserted “there’s little acting involved” among a cast that included Michael Gambon and Sienna Miller, “but Craig’s vulnerable yet supercool demeanor carries the old-school fiction lightly along.”

Layer Cake failed to make an impression at the box office, but it was seen by a few influential entertainment-industry figures. Among them was film producer Barbara Broccoli, who held the rights to the James Bond “Agent 007” character and stories, the second-most lucrative franchise in film history after Star Wars. Broccoli and her producing partner were searching for a new Bond, and were drawn to Craig after seeing his performance in Layer Cake. They offered him the lead in a highly anticipated new 007 story, Casino Royale, which would be the twenty-first in the series but was the debut tale from novelist Ian Fleming that introduced the intrepid British agent. The novel’s film rights had been mired in a legal battle for years, and two screen adaptations for the story existed: one for television in 1954—a year after Fleming’s novel was published—and then an odd 1967 film featuring David Niven and Woody Allen which actually spoofed the Bond genre, its over-the-top spy games, and its hero’s debonair charm. The actual Bond films were by then runaway cinematic hits beginning with Connery’s debut in Dr. No in 1962.

Accepting the Bond role has proved a double-edged sword for the actors who have taken it on, even Connery. The Scottish actor originated the role but was forever hampered by it over the course of his long career. After four more films, he bowed out and was replaced by Australian actor George La-zenby for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but returned for a sixth movie before Roger Moore took over in 1973 in Live and Let Die. Lazenby’s career stalled after producers dubbed his voice, and fans railed against Roger Moore’s casting, but the latter’s seven turns in the role would later be hailed as another quintessential Bond. Two other actors, Timo-thy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, failed to achieve the cult-status aura of either Connery or Moore, though the franchise continued to reap rich rewards at the box office. The 1990s-era films with Brosnan descended into typically Hollywood explosive action films, relying more on expensive special effects than the character’s clever one-upmanship. When Broccoli and her partner finally acquired Casino Royale in 1999—a deal that involved a tradeoff between movie studios for the original Fleming rights in exchange for some revenues from a planned Spider-Man series—they announced their intentions to re-tool the series and bring a new actor into the role.

Craig’s name was mentioned as a possible contender, as were those of his former Guildhall classmate McGregor, Clive Owen, Goran Visnjic, and Hugh Jackman. The lesser-known Craig bested the others, but with the October of 2005 announcement that filming was about to commence suddenly found himself in the midst of an enthusiastic and at times vicious debate over the role—especially in Britain, where Bond had achieved the status of a national icon. He faced intense criticism which even spilled over onto a Web site, craignotbond.com, for being too short for the part at five feet, eleven inches, as well as too blond and in the opinion of some, not nearly handsome enough. Internet rumors swirled around the Casino Royale shoot, including the claim that Craig did not know how to drive the manual-transmission Aston Martin racer that served as Bond’s automotive accessory. The British tabloids picked up some of the gossip and began to join in, dubbing him “James Bland.”

When Casino Royale premiered in November of 2006, however, Craig’s critics were chastened, and film reviewers echoed the sentiment that the newest Bond had proved himself utterly captivating in the role. Shot on locations that included Venice, the Bahamas, and the Czech Republic, the film featured Craig earning his “007” designation and license to kill from his bosses at the British Secret Intelligence Service, then dallying at a posh Caribbean resort, locking horns with his superior M (Judi Dench), and finally landing in a high-stakes poker game at a lavish Montenegran casino in which he must ensure that the villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) loses. In typical Bond fashion, he romances multiple women but his involvement with Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), a British treasury department official, almost proves a career-ending error in judgment.

More than one film reviewer claimed Craig’s Bond marked a return to the famously excellent 007 films of the 1960s and ’70s. “Bond became a jokey super-hero in a dinner jacket” after Connery left, noted Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, and asserted that this latest incarnation “relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn’t have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again—a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.” Writing in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis delivered similar plaudits for Craig’s performance, noting that the newest Bond “fits Fleming’s description of the character as appearing ‘ironical, brutal and cold’ better than any actor since Mr. Connery.”

Casino Royale ended the year as the top-grossing British film of 2006, and even the Blu-ray high-definition DVD edition, released in March of 2007, set an industry record by passing the 100,000 sales mark in the new format just a few short weeks after its release. The movie itself was nominated for a slew of British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, including Best Actor, but Craig lost out to a heavily favored Forest Whitaker as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.

Not surprisingly, Craig was signed to reprise his role in the next Bond project, murkily titled Bond 22 and slated for a November of 2008 release; 007 afi-cionados in cyberspace now preoccupied themselves with determining which of the Fleming tales would turn out to be the real title. Craig, meanwhile, was tying up other commitments before heading to location. These included the first in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” fantasy trilogy, The Golden Compass, in which the actor grew a long beard for the part of Lord Asriel. Divorced and the father of a daughter, Ella, born in the early 1990s, Craig is famously reticent about his personal life in interviews with the press. Casino Royale vaulted him onto an entirely different plane, he admitted in an interview with Liz Hoggard for the London Observer. “The truth is I can’t really go out at the moment,” the once hard-drinking actor said. “It’s not anything bad, and it will die down eventually. And if it stops me walking into too many bars, that’s no bad thing.”