Profile

As the new James Bond film "Skyfall" opens next week, Mary Ann Sieghart profiles its director Sam Mendes, a man who wanted to play cricket for England but went on to become a theatre supremo before winning critical acclaim in Hollywood.Born in Reading and brought up by a single mother, Sam Mendes was educated at Magdalen College School in Oxford, where he demonstrated a competitive streak as captain on the cricket pitch, and Cambridge University where he won critical acclaim for a production of "Cyrano de Bergerac". At just twenty four, he directed Judi Dench in Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" and as she tells Profile " one day when we were rehearsing, I said Sam, I would like to try this another way, can I show you? And he said to me, well you can but it won't work and so during the filming of Skyfall, he asked me to do something and so, I thought I'd complete the circle and I said, well I'll do it but it won't work and he roared with laughter. So we have closed the circle on it."Later he joined the Royal Sha