SPOTLIGHT: Daniel Craig

— -- It's a Friday afternoon in SoHo and the streets of London's artistic neighborhood are busy. Hidden in an alleyway, between music stores, bookstores and theaters that mark the borders with the neighboring West End, is the luxurious hotel where I met with Daniel Craig to discuss his second James Bond movie, "Quantum of Solace." The SoHo Hotel was not chosen at random. After all, many years ago, in these same streets, a young Daniel Wroughton Craig earned a living working in restaurants so he could pursue his dream and act at night with the cast of the National Youth Theater in a nearby hall.

Born in Chester in 1968, the son of a merchant seaman and an arts teacher (who separated when he was four years old), Daniel started acting in school plays when he was very young, encouraged by his mother who took him, along with his sister, to The Everyman Theatre productions in Liverpool. He moved to London when he was 16, where he worked at odd jobs to support himself while pursuing his acting career. In 1988 he attended the renowned Guidhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 1991, at age 23.

Craig debuted in the movies as a South African Apartheid officer in "The Power of One," and in 1996 he was hired by the BBC to play the lead role in the miniseries, "Our Friends of the North". It was an extraordinary hit, and Craig became a well-known and sought-after actor in England.

Hollywood discovered him in 2001 when he was chosen to co-star with Angelina Jolie in "Tomb Raider". He then co-starred with Paul Newman and Tom Hanks in "Road to Perdition". Craig, interested both in deep and complicated roles as well as in action movies, then played a man who has an affair with a women twice his age in "The Mother," and the poet Ted Hughes in "Sylvia", with Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2004 he was cast as a cocaine dealer in "Layer Cake" and it was this movie that showed that he had what it would take to follow into the steps of Pierce Brosnan. Soon thereafter he was chosen as the sixth actor to play the legendary and mythical, James Bond.