Surviving child-stardom is challenge enough. Usually chosen for their appeal to other kids, cinematic prodigies are so often stuck in a rut, fronting just a few teenie hits before adolescence and acne bring the hammer down on their career. It's a problem seldom overcome, yet Elijah Wood managed it. After his first (very) public appearances at the age of 8, he managed to pick a succession of roles that would keep his profile high and also allow him to become a real, grown-up actor. But then, as if avoiding becoming the next Macauley Culkin wasn't sufficiently tough, he chose to take on a part that might cement itself in the world's imagination so tightly he could never be accepted in another. Who could wear the hairy feet of Frodo Baggins and still convince in modern dramas? Surely this would be the (ho ho) hardest hobbit to break?

He was born Elijah Jordan Wood on the 28th of January, 1981, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a town of some 200,000 souls a couple of hundred miles due west of Chicago. His parents, Warren and Debbie, ran a deli in town, and were already supporting 7-year-old Zack, later a video game producer in San Diego (sister Hannah, later a poet, would arrive two years after Elijah).

Though unspeakably cute, young Elijah was a wilful child, known as Spark Plug to his benighted parents. His mother recalls a day when, at the age of only two, he locked her out of the house and proceeded to trash the kitchen as she watched helplessly through the glass in the door. Throughout his solo riot, she said, the boy was laughing, revelling in this all-too-real play-acting. Even at this tender age he was forever singing and dancing, trying to entertain, as if he were born to it.