By STEFANIE COHEN and RICHARD PRICE
She’s the Cambridge-educated actress with high cheekbones and an impeccable pedigree. He’s the brawny working-class son of a bar owner who dropped out of school at 16 to pursue acting. They couldn’t be more different, yet they got married faster than you can say “Bond, James Bond.”
After wrapping their upcoming horror flick “Dream House” last winter, Rachel Weisz, 41, and Daniel Craig, 43, wed in a secret ceremony in upstate New York this June with just four witnesses, including their children from previous relationships.
“Dream House,” a supernatural thriller that arrives in theaters on Friday, wasn’t screened early for critics — an ominous sign that the studio fears dreadful reviews. But the film was a wild success for its stars, who have their own dream house in Stone Ridge, NY, where locals had front-row tickets to their burgeoning affair all summer. The gorgeous couple was spotted canoodling at the grocery store, working out at the gym, picking up produce at the local farm stand and purchasing Italian reds at the town liquor store.
But just as an idyllic home turns into a threat in their new film, the early months of their affair and marriage forced the couple to accept one of Hollywood’s most clichéd roles: celebrity homewreckers. (Weisz announced her split from her husband, director Darren Aronofsky, in November, amid rumors she had fallen for Craig.) This summer, the pair retreated to the $2 million 1785 stone house on 123 acres in a Hudson Valley hamlet about 12 miles from New Paltz. If they thought the leafy town would provide a measure of privacy, they were mistaken. After the couple was spotted kissing in the fruit aisle of Emmanuel’s Market Place and winking at each other at the Ridge Gym, locals contacted Page Six.
They haven’t returned to either place since. “They are more under the radar than anyone else,” says Julie Bowman, owner of Jack and Luna’s Cafe, which is frequented by other celebs from surrounding towns. David Bowie and Iman, Melissa Leo, Vera Farmiga, Steve Buscemi and Aidan Quinn all have homes nearby, but Craig and Weisz keep to themselves more than most.
“They’re polite but reserved,” says one resident, who took a moment to remember exactly who they are: “Oh, you mean James Bond and the girl from ‘The Mummy!’ ”
But in their native UK, people know exactly who they are. Both began acting as teens, but arrived onstage from completely opposite backgrounds. “Rachel and Daniel come from different worlds, so in many ways they’re an odd couple,” says a friend who has known both for years. “She’s a private-school girl who grew up in a very refined suburb of north London. He’s a state-school kid whose dad owned a pub — a real ordinary Joe.”
It was actually in 1994 when Weisz and Craig first met, as part of the cast of the scandalously titled “Les Grandes Horizontales” while they were at London’s National Youth Theatre.
“I wouldn’t say Rachel and Daniel hit it off at first. He can be incredibly direct, to the point where it’s quite uncomfortable,” says the friend. “Rachel was fresh out of Cambridge, where people talked around subjects and rarely said what they thought to your face. Daniel had no time for that. He was an actor, period, and he had no time for pretentious intellectuals. He’s still like that, come to think of it.
“It was pretty obvious that Daniel noticed Rachel,” the friend adds. “He has these piercing blue eyes which seem to drill right through you, and Rachel certainly felt them on her a few times.”
In Craig, she found the archetypal alpha male. Weisz is the daughter of Jews who came to London during the Second World War — her father is a Hungarian inventor, her mother an Austrian psychoanalyst. He, meanwhile, grew up in the Wirral, a small peninsula across the River Mersey from Liverpool. Craig’s father was the landlord of the pubs Ring o’ Bells and The Boot Inn. His mother was a schoolteacher.
“Daniel is a complex guy,” says Craig’s colleague. “He didn’t exactly reinvent himself after leaving school, but he sure doesn’t like to talk about his childhood.”
Despite her advantages, Weisz was the typical insecure actress. “For all her beauty and talent, Rachel has never been the most self-assured woman,” says the friend. “Maybe that’s why she’s always so attracted to alpha males. The way he didn’t seem to give a damn what anyone thought of him — though his mates know better — was very impressive to her.”
But, at the time, Craig was married to Scottish actress Fiona Loudon, with a baby daughter, Ella, now 19, at home. Even though he had divorced Loudon by the end of 1994, leaving him a free agent, both Weisz and Craig went their separate ways.
Weisz quickly won her first major kudos in a 1994 revival of Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” and earned fame stateside as Evelyn ‘Evy’ Carnahan, Brendan Fraser’s brainy love interest in “The Mummy” in 1998.
While Craig found work in BBC drama, Weisz scored starring roles in “About a Boy” and “The Constant Gardener,” for which she took home a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
She’d also fallen in love — with Brooklyn native Aronofsky, director of “The Wrestler” and “Black Swan.” The pair met in 2001 at a performance of Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things,” in which Weisz played the female lead. In 2005, they had a child, Henry, now 5.
It was around that time that Craig won the role of the world’s most iconic secret agent — James Bond. British critics didn’t think he had the right look, and one paper even wrote: “The name’s Bland, James Bland.” But when “Casino Royale” came out in 2006, it was the most successful Bond movie ever, grossing $600 million.
While Weisz and Aronofsky set up home in the East Village, Craig went through a string of high-profile women, including Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and American film producer Satsuki Mitchell. They were allegedly still together when Craig began filming “Dream House.”
“There’s a sense that with Rachel, Daniel is trying to make amends,” says a colleague of the actor. “If you ask me, he feels pretty guilty about being an absent father, but he married far too young. That’s why he’s avoided getting married [again] for so long. He knew he couldn’t fully commit to the women he was with, so he never kidded them they were going to be the next Mrs. Craig.”
Weisz, of course, paid a high price for the title. She blew up her reputation as half of one of Hollywood’s most stable, creative couples, and transformed herself into the subject of tabloid scrutiny. And the intensely private man who plays a secret agent suddenly found himself uncomfortable in an even brighter spolight.
No wonder their first “Dream House” is a horror flick.
источник 
