A marriage made in Hollywood

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10 April 2012

When Bond star Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz married in New York last Wednesday, they caught the paparazzi napping. The ceremony took place in a friend's home and was attended by Rachel's five-year-old son, Henry (his dad is Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky), and Daniel's 18-year-old daughter, Ella, from a former marriage - plus two friends who acted as witnesses.

Rumours of a romance began in spring last year after they filmed Dream House, a thriller due out this autumn in which they play a married couple.

By November, Weisz and Aronofsky, her partner of nine years, had announced they had been separated for some months. Craig parted from his Los Angeles film producer fiancée, Satsuki Mitchell. In December, photographers snapped Craig and Weisz hand-in-hand during a Christmas break in Somerset.

Officially the couple had only been dating six months but, Craig, 43, and Weisz, 41, are old friends - part of the north London set that includes directors Roger Michell and Sam Mendes, writer Patrick Marber and actors Jude Law and Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.

On paper the match looks unlikely. Weisz grew up in Hampstead, her father, a medical inventor, comes from a Jewish Hungarian family; her mother, a psychotherapist, is Catholic Viennese. She attended St Paul's Girls School and Cambridge.

Craig is a working-class Liverpool boy - son of a merchant seaman turned pub landlord - who left school at 16.

But both are fiercely intelligent and politicised.

The first time I met Craig was in 2003, during filming for Michell's Enduring Love at the London Review Bookshop. Every time shooting stopped, Craig piled books behind the till - novels, poetry, philosophy, a biography of Bob Dylan - to purchase at the end of the day.

At that point, the industry had Craig marked down as bruiser material after he played Geordie Peacock in Our Friends in the North and Francis Bacon's burglar lover in Love is The Devil. But you underestimate Craig at your peril.

As Enduring Love's producer Kevin Loader told me: "He's either reading or listening to music all the time. He burns CDs for everyone on set with a wonderfully eclectic range of music on them but with perfect taste."

Both Craig and Weisz, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Constant Gardener in 2005, the same year as Craig was chosen as the new James Bond, have made daring career choices, juggling Hollywood with independent British films and projects by European arthouse directors.

They are also talented stage actors. Weisz won the Evening Standard 2009 Award for Best Actress for A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar. Craig, who has worked at the Royal Court and the National, is a classically trained actor who regularly went to the Liverpool Everyman theatre as a child. After a spell at the National Youth Theatre, he attended Guildhall School of Music and Drama, alongside Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes.

For very beautiful people with a slow-burn sensuality, they play down their looks. Weisz, a radical feminist at university, thinks Botox should be banned. When she was with Aronofsky, she favoured demure Roland Mouret frocks. With Craig she has developed an edgier style - T-shirts, jeans, ankle boots.

Craig loathes celebrity. "He's strangely ego-less for an actor," says the director John Maybury, "and able to distance himself from the rigmarole of celebrity." Craig himself says: "Self-promotion, for me, is like going to the dentist."

While other actresses, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, have played down their Jewishness, Weisz has always refused to change her name. A male journalist who interviewed her early in her career says: "She is very pretty and very sexy - and the two don't always go together - but also genuinely clever, impatient of stupidity, and forthright to the point of rudeness.

"When I met her, she was driving a massive Jaguar that she maintained herself and was having an affair with Neil Morrissey - an example of down-dating which surely gave all men hope."

Weisz and Craig both lived through their parents' painful divorces (which may be why they mistrusted marriage in the past). Weisz's parents separated when she was 15. When his parents split up, Craig and his sister lived with their art-teacher mother.

At 24, he married actress Fiona Loudon in 1992 and they had a daughter, but divorced four years later. He had a seven-year relationship with German-born Heike Makatsch, who played Alan Rickman's secretary in Love Actually. There was a reported fling with Kate Moss. Then, in October 2005, the News of the World claimed he had spent the night with his Layer Cake co-star, Sienna Miller, while she was with Law and he was with Satsuki Mitchell. He stayed seven years with Mitchell but they never married.

Weisz started modelling at 13 after her mother sent a holiday snap to Harpers & Queen. A year later, she was offered a role in the Richard Gere film, King David. It caused heated rows between her parents but ultimately Weisz turned the offer down. At Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, where she read English, Weisz founded a student theatre group and in 1992, she and three friends took an improvised piece to the Edinburgh Festival. The show won a Guardian award, Weisz got an agent.

Known as the Trinity Hall heartbreaker, she dated comedian Ben Miller and actor Alessandro Nivola.

In 1994, she won the Critics' Circle award for Best Newcomer but it was playing the librarian in The Mummy (1999) that made her a household name.

She began dating Sam Mendes, then the toast of Hollywood for his film American Beauty, the same year, but the charming commitment-phobe dumped her when he met Kate Winslet in 2001.

Soon after, Weisz met Aronofsky and moved to New York. Craig and Weisz were photographed in 2004 at a private New York screening, looking surreally good together. But it was to be another six years before they became an item.

Although they have been dubbed the new Richard Burton and Liz Taylor for their equally matched beauty, talent and fame, there remains an enigma about them. And unlike that other famous British-born Hollywood couple, Weisz and Craig hate parties, shopping and showbiz. One suspects that theirs will be a calmer marriage with rumours that they are keen to start a family.

Meanwhile both have work commitments: Craig is doing the next Bond (directed by Mendes), Weisz is in David Hare's Page Eight with Bill Nighy.

But the only film we really want to see is Dream House, where passion finally spilled over into real life.

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