Fresh-faced Rooney Mara wins 'Dragon Tattoo'

Little-known American actress Rooney Mara has scored a casting coup and will play the lead in three Hollywood adaptations of Stieg Larsson's wildly popular "The Millennium Trilogy."

Mara, 24, hails from New York state and will play Lisbeth Salander – the smart but anti-social pixie-haired hacker and investigator – opposite Briton Daniel Craig, 42, of James Bond fame.

The US actress has worked with director David Fincher in the past on "The Social Network."

In the end, the actress reportedly beat out a raft of top young actresses interested in the plum role, including the likes of Ellen Page, Natalie Portman and Carey Mulligan.

Rooney Mara is the sister of actress Kate Mara and appeared in the 2010 remake of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and had small parts in TV dramas "ER" and "Law Order: Special Victims Unit."

Craig, best known as the most recent incarnation of James Bond, will play journalist and amateur sleuth Mikael Blomkvist in the movie, Columbia said.

The first film, "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," will film in Sweden and the United States and is due out in December 2011. Filming begins next month. Craig and Mara will also appear in U.S. versions of the two movie sequels "The Girl Who Played with Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest."

Swedish film adaptation of Larsson's work has already been done; Dane Niels Arden Oplev directed the first installment and Swede Daniel Alfredson the other two. Together, they have taken more than $157 million at box offices worldwide.

Hollywood, however, is betting that an English language remake of the international best-sellers, will reap benefits. The three cult Stieg Larsson novels, first published in Swedish in 2007, have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

Larsson died in 2004 aged 50 before the books became a global hit.

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