She will star opposite Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, James Bond’s 21st big screen venture.

Thandie, 33, a mum of two, was born in Zimbabwe 10 years after the first Bond film was made in 1962.

Her mother is a princess but the family emigrated to Cornwall when the girl who went on to star in Mission Impossible II was just five.

Thandie — it’s pronounced Tandy — is now prepared for the glare of the spotlight that goes with being part of the Bond industry.

But it wasn’t always this way — she suffered a breakdown during her first brush with fame.

She told The Sun: “I had a very tough time being a teenager in the film business.

“It’s not a place for young people unless you have your mum standing by you the whole time, and that isn’t possible.

“It’s too much responsibility and you just grow up too quickly.”

She fell for director John Duigan who cast her in her first movie, Flirting. She was 16, he was 41 and she moved to Hollywood to be with him — but it all ended in tears.

She admitted: “I was exploited at work and in my personal life, and I don’t think he behaved very well. I wish I had been older when I started, to be honest. I grew up really, really fast.”

After leaving Duigan she developed an eating disorder and went into therapy.

Now she has returned to Britain and turned her life around. Thandie is happily married to script writer Oliver Parker and they dote on their two daughters, Ripley, five, and one-year-old Nico.

She met her husband in 1997 when they worked together on a BBC film about date rape, In Your Dreams.

The couple, who live in North London, try to combine work and parenthood.

Thandie revealed: “We help each other out — I’m his script editor. It’s great. We’re the best of friends and I can’t think of a nicer way to combine our lives.

“It’s a terrific career being a mum because there’s a lot of downtime making movies. You work intensely for two or three months and then you can take six months off and that’s wonderful, fantastic.”

Thandie even turned down a chance to be one of Charlie’s Angels to be a mum.

She said: “I had been away from home for nearly a year and family comes first, it really does. I decided not to do it and I had my baby — that’s my little Charlie’s Angel.”

The decision has not harmed Thandie’s career. Apart from landing the Bond girl role, she has also been nominated for a Bafta for Best Supporting Actress for playing Christine in Crash.

Having once had an eating disorder, Thandie insists she now keeps in shape purely for health reasons — and her routine is hot stuff.

She said: “I don’t do it because of Hollywood. It’s a personal pressure. I just feel better.

“I do Bikram yoga and that’s so good. It’s this hot yoga — they heat the room to over 100degrees and you do yoga like that. It’s amazing.”

Thandie’s mother Nyasha is a princess in the Shona tribe of Zimbabwe. The family had to flee Africa because of political unrest in 1977. The family moved to Penzance in Cornwall, where Thandie’s father Nick’s parents were from.

At the age of 11 Thandie — whose real name is Thandiwe, which means beloved — went to London’s Art Educational School to study dance.

But a back injury ended her dancing dream and she pursued an acting career instead. She appeared in six movies while on the way to getting a degree in anthropology at Cambridge.

Thandie, who will play Brit spy Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, regrets leaving her homeland. She said: “I wish I spoke my family’s language. I haven’t been there for ages. I was at university, then working and every time my mum would go to visit, I couldn’t because I was busy.”

She admits that Robert Mugabe’s oppressive regime has put her off returning.
She said: “There are problems there to such a degree that I want to go when it’s a happy, thriving place.

“It’s sad when there’s political unrest in a country, of course. It’s terrible for the people.