It seems fitting that the film industry’s biggest secret — who would replace Pierce Brosnan as 007 — was broken one day early by Daniel Craig’s delighted mother. Her name is Blond — Carol Blond. And it follows that the newly anointed Craig will be the first blond actor to play Ian Fleming’s dark-haired sadist.

Craig is not an obvious choice. Although possessed of a smouldering screen presence and piercing blue eyes, his nickname “Mr Potato Head” suggests that he lacks the clean good looks of his five predecessors as James Bond — Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Brosnan.

Indeed, some think he is not the real goods. Bookmakers are already taking bets that, like Lazenby, he will not survive the first movie. His comprehensive school background and Liverpool roots highlighted by the tabloids are irrelevant: few of the 007 acting dynasty shared the privileged upbringing sketched by Fleming for his hero. Similarly a well-chronicled fondness for beer and four-letter words do not count against him. But his self-confessed “craggy” face and scrubby complexion might have been a worry for the Bond producers before they awarded him a £15m three-film contract.

Craig voiced two reservations about stepping into Bond’s tuxedo: would the role stunt his acting ambitions and could he act as well as Connery? Both concerns seem ill-founded. Having come to prominence in the BBC series Our Friends in the North and achieved star status by teaming up with Paul Newman and Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition, Craig is in great demand on film and stage. At 37 he has a more bankable reputation than the 32-year-old Connery when the latter inaugurated the Bond series in 1962. Perhaps he was really fretting about his looks.

Craig claims that Brosnan in effect handed him the keys to the Aston Martin at a Bafta awards party, urging him to “go for it”. It seems more probable that Craig was reassured by the experience of the actor Michael Gambon, with whom he has collaborated in stage and film productions.

Gambon is fond of recalling how, to his astonishment, he was sized up for the part of Bond by the producer Cubby Broccoli, who was then seeking to replace Lazenby. “But I’m bald, my teeth are bad and my breasts sag,” he exclaimed. Don’t worry, Broccoli replied: “We have icebags for Sean’s chest. Teeth, we can do that in an afternoon. And Sean wears a piece.”

Given such artifice, it is perhaps odd that Craig, at 6ft the shortest Bond, won the role over the 5ft 10in Ewan McGregor on the basis of his height. According to a leaked memo from Eon Productions, owner of the Bond franchise and inherited by Broccoli’s daughter Barbara: “Eric Bana was deemed not handsome enough. Hugh Jackman was too fey, Colin Farrell too sleazy and Ewan McGregor too short. (Barbara) Broccoli championed oft- reported contender Daniel Craig.”

Craig has other assets that fascinate the gossip writers: a complicated love life and a hint of caddishness to match Bond’s. His long-time friendship with Jude Law is apparently in ruins after his reported fling with Law’s girlfriend Sienna Miller.

The affair is said to have begun two years ago when Craig and Miller worked together on the British gangster film Layer Cake, then was rekindled recently while Law and Miller were patching up a relationship that had been scarred by Law’s infidelity with his children’s nanny.

Craig has a 13-year-old daughter from his marriage to the actress Fiona Loudon in 1992 when they were both 24. It lasted nearly four years.

He had a seven-year relationship with the German-born Heike Makatsch, who played Alan Rickman’s secretary in the film Love Actually. She was said to be “devastated” to discover last year that he was seeing the model Kate Moss, now in rehab for cocaine addiction. Craig’s current belle is said to be Satsuki Mitchell, a 29-year-old Los Angeles film producer.

Many of Craig’s film roles feature him as a diabolical lover. In The Mother (2003) he portrays a builder who sleeps with a 67-year-old grandmother and her daughter. Last year he was an intense Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow’s naked Sylvia Plath in Sylvia, which focused on the turbulent relationship between the two poets.

On the downside Craig is famously leery of publicity. “Self-promotion, for me, is like going to the dentist,” he has admitted. However, he can be garrulous on films, capitalism and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. When he catches himself sounding pretentious, he stabs two fingers towards his eyes, exclaiming “W**ker!” He avoids parties, preferring to drink at the Banker’s Draught near his unloved Victorian house in north London. Whereas Bond smoked Morland Specials, Craig prefers roll-ups.

He was born on March 2 1968 in Chester, the second child of Tim, a former merchant seaman who became a pub landlord, and his then wife Carol, an art teacher.

By his father’s account Craig revealed his ambition while weaving in and out of drinkers’ legs at the family’s Ring O’ Bells pub in nearly Frodsham. “Someone asked what he was going to do when he grew up and without breaking stride he said, ‘Be an actor’.”

His stage debut in Oliver! at the age of six impressed Peter Mason, headmaster of Frodsham Church of England primary school: “Both Daniel and his older sister Lia were very good. I could tell even then that Daniel was gifted. I was sorry when they left the school.”

Their departure to Liverpool and then the Wirral was prompted by their parents’ divorce. Craig’s acting talent continued to shine at Hilbre high school in Newton, encouraged by visits to the Liverpool Everyman theatre arranged by his mother. She now works as a comprehensive school teacher and lives with her third husband, Max Blond.

Academically poor, Craig had failed the 11-plus and left school at 16 before his A-levels. “I was always going to move to London,” he recalled. “I always wanted to be an actor. I had the arrogance to believe I couldn’t be anything else.” A spell at the National Youth Theatre came to nothing, but then he found his feet at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama alongside McGregor, Joseph Fiennes and Alistair McGowan, the impressionist.

As a struggling actor he waited on tables and became one of the rootless types he ended up playing. The need to survive made him unscrupulous, he confessed: “You have to live off people’s floors and rent property and you end up doing runners.” His training left him with an aversion to Shakespeare and costume drama: “I don’t want to be dressing up in costumes and pansying around. When I left drama school the only jobs were for boys in floppy fringes who went to Eton. I could fit in because I could do a slightly posh accent. But I realised actually I can’t really be posh.”

He worked regularly in his twenties, but was pushing 30 when the BBC offered him the role of a strip club boss in a huge saga about life in Britain, set in Newcastle and London, covering 30 years. Our Friends in the North changed his life.

Turning his back on a predictable television career, he opted for a series of small independent films that led to more high profile roles. He had by then played a thuggish Afrikaner cop in The Power of One and later was an assassin in Elizabeth. He was the villain in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, earning an accolade from its star, Angelina Jolie, as “one of the best kissers”.

He plays the lead in Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming film Munich. Shooting on a sci-fi thriller The Visiting with Nicole Kidman in Baltimore was interrupted for Craig to be unveiled as Bond before the media in London. Casino Royale, being filmed in Prague next month, is the second crack at the story. A spoof, starring David Niven and Peter Sellers, appeared in 1967 but bore no resemblance to the 1953 book.

Craig’s challenge is to find a way of stretching himself within the role. “I love obsessiveness in movies. I love being twisted,” he once observed. He may get his wish. In Fleming’s book Bond is tortured by having his genitals beaten and spends three weeks in hospital.

Paul Haggis, the screenwriter, has promised us a grittier plot than usual, but this scenario is surely too much to hope for.