While Daniel Craig wins all the attention, the Spanish actor's performance in Skyfall has seen him acclaimed as the best Bond villain yet. But his stunning range makes him as much aesthete as action man

Hoopla is only to be expected when there is a new James Bond movie in the offing and Skyfall has attracted more than its fair share for several reasons. It's the 50th anniversary of Bond on film, as well as make-or-break time for Daniel Craig after the poorly received Quantum of Solace. It has at its helm Sam Mendes, a director as respected in drama as he is untested in the action genre; and it arrives after the greatest promotional coup in British cinema –a prime spot for Bond in the London Olympics opening ceremony.

But the moments that elevate Skyfall from the efficient to the inspired can be attributed to one man: Javier Bardem, the hulking, 43-year-old Spanish actor whose delicious performance as Raoul Silva, sniggering cyber-terrorist, makes him a convincing contender for best Bond villain of all time.

With his dandyish bleached locks and sinister omnipresence, Silva appears at first to be cut from familiar cloth. In fact, he is the most textured and sympathetic villain in the entire series. "He's a peacock of a character, unlike anything Javier's played before," says Mendes. "Canny and witty and flirtatious in a disturbing way that even I didn't expect."

But then you don't cast an actor of Bardem's calibre as a thug. He is a three-time Oscar nominee, with one of those coveted statuettes to his name for playing a calm, remorseless killer in No Country for Old Men; keeping it company are assorted doorstops and bookends including a Bafta, a Golden Globe, the best actor prize from Cannes and five of Spain's Goya awards. He is highly discerning; his CV is littered with the names of outstanding directors, from Pedro Almodóvar (Live Flesh) and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu (Biutiful) to Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and Terrence Malick (To the Wonder).

Bardem, Mendes explains, was not immediately sold on the idea: "He was the one person who didn't say yes straight away." Mendes promised he could develop the character and says that many of the ideas - the way he looked, the hair colour - were Bardem's own. "I thought they weren't going to work," says Mendes. "All of them worked." Mendes certainly uses Bardem for maximum impact. The actor makes his entrance in Skyfall without fanfare or pyrotechnics; instead, he strolls slowly, even seductively, out of the distance and toward the camera in one long take. When he finally reaches Bond, he doesn't threaten him with any of the accoutrements of the supervillain; he opens Bond's shirt and trails his fingers across his chest.

No one who is familiar with Bardem's work will be surprised at the charisma and complexity he lends to Skyfall. It was there in his earliest work, playing oversexed lugs in risque comedies such as Jamón Jamón and Golden Balls, where Bardem exhibited an unapologetic sexual energy. He brought as much intelligence to these goofball parts as he did later to his Oscar-nominated work as the persecuted Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (which prompted Al Pacino to leave him an admiring answer phone message) or as a people trafficker in Biutiful, a performance championed during awards season by the likes of Julia Roberts and Michael Mann.

Despite the high esteem in which he is held in the US film industry, Bardem has divorced himself for the most part from the circus of celebrity. He lives now in Madrid with his wife, Penélope Cruz, whom he married in the Bahamas in 2010, a union of Spain's two leading stars, and their one-year-old son, Leo.

Bardem was born in 1969 into a family of actors stretching back to Mercedes Sampedro, a stage actor in the late 19th century. The clan's strong leftwing principles had on occasion landed them in trouble with the Franco regime. "It was a very troubled time," according to Bardem, "to the point that to have the surname Bardem in those times was not good; you were pursued and put in jail." His mother, uncle, grandfather and siblings have all performed professionally, but far from making him highfalutin or pretentious, this background instilled in Bardem a sense of pride and dedication.

"My grandparents saw a lot of ups and downs and I knew from them that the job could entail difficulties. The only thing to do is to concentrate on working hard." Indeed, he seems positively embarrassed by praise or attention. "You want your work to be liked," he told me in 2008. "But at the same time you can't let it all become about acclaim and approval. Awards feed the ego and you don't want that. You have to protect the acting."

Although he had occasional roles in Spanish film and television during his childhood, Bardem's interests were not restricted to acting. He studied painting for four years and was also a member of Spain's national underage rugby team right up until Jamón Jamón brought him widespread recognition. Not that his distinctive misshapen nose is the result of a vindictive tackle: "Some guy just came out of the blue in a bar when I was 19 and wanted to have some fun."

His career had been building steadily in Spain throughout the 1990s, but it was Julian Schnabel's decision to cast him in Before Night Falls that changed his prospects overnight. It also required him to learn English. "The differences between my Spanish acting and my English acting are fewer now," he noted, "but I'll never be as comfortable in English. I just don't have the depth of history that I have with my own language."

Fortunately, he is also renowned for his dynamic physicality. John Malkovich, who directed him in the political thriller The Dancer Upstairs, has described Bardem as possessing "the strength and power of a bull, like a young Gérard Depardieu, but with a very masculine fragility underneath".

It's fascinating, then, that he seems drawn to parts that inhibit those natural strengths, forcing him into unfamiliar, uncomfortable situations. Take Live Flesh, in which he played a sexually insecure cop confined to a wheelchair. Or The Sea Inside, where his role as the real-life quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro, who lobbied for the right to kill himself, required him to age 20 years and spend the entire film bedridden. Not since Misery confined the famously hyperactive James Caan to a similar fate had an actor's boundless energy been contained so perversely.

"The only reason I chose Javier was because he's the best actor in Spain," said the film's director, Alejandro Amenábar. "Everything else was against him. He had the charisma, that was important. But his body was too big and the ageing makeup was a nightmare. But he was just so good." It was a stunningly focused performance, though one Hollywood director confided to me that he thought Bardem had been too likable in the part – that he hadn't risked challenging the audience.

The same charge could scarcely be levelled at him in the Coen brothers' film of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Even viewers too hardy to be perturbed by his portrayal of Anton Chigurh, the chillingly calm personification of evil, would surely have balked at his hairdo, a glossy, side-parted, unyielding bob. "This rigid, almost mathematical haircut gives the impression that the guy is ordered but also insane. There must be something broken or out of sync in his mind for him to wear that hairstyle and think it's normal. It makes you wonder what's beneath the hair."

Typically for Bardem, the part was important not for the acclaim it brought him but for what it helped him discover about himself. "Actors are lucky; we get to express ourselves fully in our work. But the bad thing is that we have to confront the ghosts, the badness inside us, and not be afraid of that. Of course, I haven't killed anyone, but when I did this film I needed to face up to the violence that I bring with me."

No Country for Old Men provided Bardem with his widest audience yet, but it didn't alter the direction of his career and it's doubtful that the success of Skyfall will do so either. He's just finished shooting his next film, Ridley Scott's thriller The Counselor, alongside Cruz, Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender; before that, we should get to see Malick's To the Wonder, in which he plays a priest suffering a crisis of faith.

But if Bardem gets offered more blockbusters in the wake of playing Silva in Skyfall, he'll be no more likely to take them than he would have been before. Actors routinely tell the world that it's all about the work, that the fame and the money mean nothing, but Bardem is one of the few who can say it with conviction. The day he sells out and accepts a job for the money will probably be the day the sky falls.