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Daniel Craig

The kids won’t be getting my cash

Daniel Craig with his wife, Rachel Weisz. Dave Allocca/Starpix/Shutterstock

Daniel Craig is ashamed of the £116m he’s made “flying around the globe pretending to shag lovely ladies while reciting laughable dialogue”, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. He finds “distasteful” the idea of passing on “great sums” to his two daughters. As he put it: “My philosophy is: get rid of it or give it away before you die.” One can see where’s he’s coming from: perhaps it’s wrong to leave great sums to anyone “and potentially destroy their career via caviar”. But where is Craig’s sacrifice? “Why is it distasteful for his children to have so much money, but not him?”

He may turn to be out “one of the decent ones”, spending his money on charity rather than whizzing round space, says Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. He’s also doing his daughters a favour: children rarely “emerge unscathed” if they grow up expecting a vast fortune. At any rate, I’m sure they won’t be “scrabbling down the back of the sofa for loose change”.

As someone with a mortgage “visible from space”, I really don’t want to be lectured on the “morality of inheritance” by a man who just signed a £73m deal with Netflix, says Bryony Gordon in the Telegraph. “For most of us, having money to actually leave for our children is a life goal.” Craig’s philosophy is “get rid of it or give it away before you go”. It seems that’s always been his way. He was paid £18,000 for his 1992 film debut, The Power of One. It was a “f***ing fortune” for a young man who grew up in a “rough” part of Liverpool, he told GQ last year. He “spent every single penny”, not realising he had to pay tax. It took him five years to pay off the bill.