Saïd Taghmaoui may be the most unlikely movie star ever to come out of France. The youngest of 10 children of Moroccan immigrants, he grew up in la Cité des 3000, the notorious ghetto in Aulnay-sous-Bois, the poor Paris suburb and flash point for France's race riots in 2005. He dropped out of school at 14 and became a delinquent, spray-painting his graffiti tag wherever he could. He got into boxing, and by the time he was 17 he had made it to the French championships twice. He proved a deft break-dancer and joined a French gangsta-rap group called Assassin. In 1995, Taghmaoui teamed up with aspiring filmmaker and friend Mathieu Kassovitz to make the revolutionary film "La Haine" ("Hate"), a blunt look at the turbulent lives of the residents of the French projects. The film earned wide acclaim and won Kassovitz the best-director award at Cannes. And it set Taghmaoui on a course to global fame.

Today the 34-year-old actor has scored a string of big Hollywood roles unmatched by a French actor since Maurice Chevalier's "Gigi" days. Taghmaoui currently appears in Marc Forster's much-anticipated "The Kite Runner" as Farid, the driver who guides Amir through Afghanistan in search of a child. In February he'll costar alongside Dennis Quaid and Sigourney Weaver in "Vantage Point," playing a witness to a political assassination at a terrorism conference in Spain. He'll also appear in the CIA thriller "Traitor," with Don Cheadle, and play Saddam Hussein's brother Barzan Ibrahim in "Between Two Rivers," a BBC-HBO television mini-series about Saddam's life. And he'll soon begin filming with costar Sienna Miller the first of three megabudget "G.I. Joe" movies, based on the Marvel comic-book series.

Taghmaoui attributes his success to his decision to get out of France. "As a minority actor in France, you often wind up playing the buffoon," he says. "So I went international." He worked on his American-accented English by watching movies and listening to music. Eventually he landed small parts in choice Hollywood productions, including "Three Kings," and a recurring role as a Middle East ambassador on the TV series "The West Wing." In France, he made sure his characters were not caricatures. "I turned down a lot of work," he says. Presenting him with an award at the 2005 Cairo Film Festival, Omar Sharif declared Taghmaoui his cinematic heir. "I cried," Taghmaoui recalls.

Taghmaoui hasn't forgotten his roots. With his first big check from "La Haine," he bought his family a nice house. "My parents say I'm like a prophet, that my work is a mission from God," he explains. And his pals in the 'hood cheer him on, calling him "la cerise sur le ghetto—a play on the saying 'the cherry on the cake'," he says with a laugh. "I got out. I made it." It's the kind of ending Hollywood loves.