Most film stars tipped to collect a fourth best actor Oscar—their sixth Academy Award nomination overall—would barely be out of the public eye. But Daniel Day-Lewis has a talent for disappearing. When taking on a role, he hunkers down for months or even years of preparation.
Between films he steps away entirely, provoking speculation that he has abandoned it all for cobbling or carpentry. In a life story populated with ghosts, perhaps the most persistent is the enigmatic, elusive man himself.
Thanks to a lifetime of reticence and fiercely-guarded privacy—he rarely gives press interviews—there is an almost translucent quality to Day-Lewis’s persona, which makes him an actor of rare talent.
The effect is increased by the mythology that surrounds his method-acting techniques. Day-Lewis famously keeps in character for the whole shoot; often other actors and crew members are forbidden from interacting with him.
He embraces hardship, even humiliation—he lived in a cell and insisted on being doused with icy water in preparation for prison drama In the Name of the Father. For Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), he learned how to dismember a pig; for 1997’s The Boxer he spent over a year getting pummelled by ex-fighter Barry McGuigan.
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The intense privacy is perhaps one part of his birthright. Born in 1957, the youngest son of Cecil Day-Lewis, later the poet laureate, and his second wife, the actress Jill Balcon, his maternal grandfather was the head of Ealing Studios. The family, which lived in Greenwich, southeast London and holidayed in Ireland—Cecil’s birthplace, and the country where Day-Lewis now bases himself—were close enough to the public eye to know that they preferred to be private. One simply didn’t talk to the press; anyone who did was beyond the pale."One simply didn’t talk to the press"
To this day, Day-Lewis is estranged from his older half-brother Sean, after Sean wrote a tell-all biography of their father detailing his serial infidelities, and then—to make matters worse—contributed to an unauthorised biography of Daniel himself. Day-Lewis also expressed fury at his uncle, Jonathan Balcon, for passing judgment on his own relationship with Rebecca Miller, daughter of the playwright Arthur. Balcon called him a “bounder” because the two married without the knowledge of Day-Lewis’s girlfriend at the time. (Day-Lewis left a previous partner, the actor Isabelle Adjani, while she was pregnant.) “If he had been younger,” Day-Lewis remarked of his uncle, “I’d have taken him to the marketplace and smacked him, quite honestly.” It is not just in attitudes towards privacy that Cecil Day-Lewis influenced his son. The poet died of pancreatic cancer in 1973, when Day-Lewis was 15 and mired in teenage rebellion—something that left him with a painful sense of unfinished business. Talking of Cecil’s worries about his behaviour, Day-Lewis said: “I think my father was preoccupied with whether I’d survive as a human being.” One response was to trawl through his father’s writing. In Cecil’s memoir, The Buried Day (1960), Day-Lewis discovered how his father dealt with fears by plunging headlong into them. It was this knowledge that prompted him to tackle what would become his final stage role of Hamlet, in a production directed by Richard Eyre at the National Theatre in 1989. Although by that time Day-Lewis was a rising movie star, when he started out it seemed that theatre would be his métier. His first lead West End role, in 1983, was in Julian Mitchell’s public-school drama Another Country, taking over from Rupert Everett. He subsequently joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and toured with Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the production of Hamlet was ill-fated. One night, nearing the end of the run, Day-Lewis walked out of the show halfway through and didn’t return. At the time, he cited “nervous exhaustion” and claimed to have seen the ghost of his father. To this day he has never been back on stage.Later, Day-Lewis qualified his reasons for pulling out. “To some extent, I probably saw my father’s ghost every night, because of course if you’re working in a play like Hamlet you explore everything through your own experience. That correspondence between father and son, or the son and the father who is no longer alive, played a huge part in that experience. So yes, of course, it was communication with my own dead father, but I don’t remember seeing any ghosts of my father on that dreadful night.”
Eyre, who directed Day-Lewis in a BBC television movie titled The Insurance Man before working with him in theatre, said: “I think he just lost his confidence. He didn’t believe in himself there. Once your confidence goes, you are in a vortex.” Eyre continued: “There’s a lot of pain. You wish him less pain, but it seems cruel to wish anything for him that would make him less himself.” At the time, the pair lived in the same London neighbourhood, and Eyre was touched by the kindness the actor showed towards his 13-year-old daughter, who was—perhaps not surprisingly—smitten. Day-Lewis also became very close to his agent, Julian Belfrage, whose death from cancer in 1994 was rumoured to have precipitated another breakdown.***
Given the long shadow cast by Day-Lewis’s father, it’s interesting to note that he chose to follow his mother’s career path. He and his older sister Tamasin had flirted with acting from an early age, putting on impromptu shows at the home of their maternal grandfather. Day-Lewis recalled devising a one-boy performance of Harold Pinter’s play The Dumb Waiter when he was 10 years old. But the urge to perform was also born out of a troubled period for the actor. Alarmed by the fact that their son seemed to be careering off the rails at his state school in southeast London, his parents dispatched him to board at Sevenoaks School in Kent. He loathed it, but it was there that he was introduced to acting. The teenage Day-Lewis was spotty, sullen and morose, and had a penchant for shopping for flick knives. But in theatre—specifically the National Youth Theatre—he found focus. After two years at Sevenoaks, Day-Lewis absconded and turned up at his sister Tamasin’s school, Bedales in Hampshire. He transferred there soon after—the liberal, creative approach of the place more sympathetic to his talents. Day-Lewis also developed a parallel passion for carpentry, and for a time even considered it as a career, applying for an apprenticeship with the cabinetmaker John Makepeace. He has described the workshop as a “sanctuary.” “I was terrified of the responsibility of creativity,” he later observed. “My mind wasn’t a place where I was comfortable.” In the end, he applied to just one drama school, at Bristol Old Vic. He got in.“I was terrified of the responsibility of creativity”
Still, he seems attracted by the certainties of craftsmanship: a table is either well made or it isn’t, whereas a piece of acting, no matter how carefully planned, is improvisatory by its nature and open to interpretations. And that is where the doubts seep in. Day-Lewis has often seemed torn: each lengthy hiatus he takes is filled with what he clearly regards as honest graft—carpentry, shoe-making. He yearns to create something tangible with his hands. “I don’t think he hates acting,” Eyre said. “But from the fact that he keeps wanting to work with his hands, one could infer that he doesn’t think that it is an activity to revere, in spite of the fact that he is fantastically good at it.”***
After graduating in 1979, his breakthrough film role came in Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), playing gay punk Johnny, the lover and business partner of a young man of Pakistani heritage. Day-Lewis arrived at the audition equipped with bleached hair—he was playing an albino Count Dracula in a fringe production on stage at the time—and the south London accent he had learned as a defence mechanism after children at his state school mocked him for being posh. He brought a leonine quality to the role, in one famous scene vaulting lithely over an industrial washing machine, and a predator’s stillness and focus. His Johnny relished the unsettling effect of his own presence. Fascinated with craft—this time of a new medium, film—he spent several weeks with Frears in the editing suite. Johnny, all swagger and sex and danger, hit cinemas at the same time as another, equally memorable performance—one that provided audiences with early indication of Day-Lewis’s shape-shifting qualities. As Cecil Vyse, the fiancé of Helena Bonham Carter’s Lucy in the Merchant-Ivory reimagining of EM Forster’s A Room with a View (1985), he represented stifling Victorian propriety and snobbishness. Day-Lewis went to town, offering an insufferable prig peering through his pince-nez, lips pursed in a self-satisfied pout. But it wasn’t until his next major role, as a womanising Czech doctor in Philip Kaufman’s 1988 movie adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that his exhaustive approach to research came into play. As part of his preparation, he learned to speak Czech, and, for the first time, refused to break character throughout the shoot. The film took around six months to make, and took its toll. He later said that “I reached perhaps the lowest ebb I have ever reached,” and, once it was done, he took a year out to travel around Europe. Then came 1989’s My Left Foot, in which he played the writer and artist Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy, and whose severe disabilities meant he could control just one of his limbs. The opening pages of the screenplay set a challenge, even for an actor who was already known for pushing himself: the camera follows a foot as it puts a record on to a turntable, lowers the stylus and then moves it to the desired passage of music. Day-Lewis was convinced the trick couldn’t be done, but after extensive practice, managed to pull it off in one take. Almost as striking is what comes immediately after. Christy’s head rears back in an involuntary spasm, and he briefly makes eye contact with the camera—both a defiant glare and a moment of intimate vulnerability. Day-Lewis’s preparation was even more extensive than before. Crew members were expected to push him in a wheelchair and spoon-feed him his meals. It paid off: he won his first Oscar for the performance.***
Day-Lewis was not formally trained in “method” acting, which is in any case far more popular in the US than among classically trained Brits. This technique was born out of the early 20th-century teachings of the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who advocated psychological realism in theatre, and then developed by Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg. Strasberg mentored stars such as Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, and his Actors Studio in New York became a required stop for serious-minded, obsessive young performers. But Day-Lewis’s approach, far more immersive even than De Niro (who gained so much weight to play the washed-up boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull that his colleagues feared for his health), seems to be personal. For him it seems to be a crucial part of remaining connected to the characters he draws, almost like literary creations, from deep within himself. At times, the means can overshadow the ends. Take The Last of the Mohicans (1992), where Day-Lewis played Hawkeye, the white, adopted son of a Mohican chief, who finds himself at odds with a British army major when they fall in love with the same woman. Audiences are perhaps more likely to remember the stories—that the actor lived in the wild and whittled himself a canoe—than what he did on screen. In fact, it’s a mesmerising performance: Day-Lewis moves with a panther’s grace, crouched low over the land. He has a hunter’s knack of vanishing into the background, and a movie star’s gift of drawing your eye to his slightest movement. Physical transformations like these are one reason that the characters seep under his skin. The limp of prospector Daniel Plainview in 2007’s There Will Be Blood marks him out, just as surely as the ambition and hunger that is branded into his soul. The walk he gave Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s biopic five years later is even more characteristic: in the words of the critic Anthony Lane, “a singular shuffle, half comic, half sorrowful, like that of a man hastening to catch up with a funeral procession and threatening at any instant to tip over and fall on his nose.”"He’s not acting. He’s being."
Ultimately, the defining characteristic of a Day-Lewis performance is a sense that the line between actor and role is not just permeable, but torn down completely. In Phantom Thread, as an obsessively controlling couturier, he genuinely seems not so much to inhabit the character as somehow be the person. There is a moment in the movie when Woodcock is dressing his muse, Alma, and he appraises her over the top of his glasses, pauses, and then minutely adjusts the line of her dress. According to Mark Kermode: “I genuinely believe that if Anderson stopped rolling the cameras, he would go on fixating on the dress. It’s as if the performance extends beyond the film and out into the real world. He’s not acting. He’s being.” Increasingly, Day-Lewis has found it hard to shake off his characters. The film-maker Jim Sheridan, who directed him in 1993’s In the Name of the Father as Gerry Conlon, one of the “Guildford Four” wrongly accused of an IRA pub bombing, recalled that Day-Lewis was still talking in his character’s Northern Irish brogue six months after shooting wrapped. A bone-deep sadness would overcome him at the end of each film. “I’ve come to believe that it is absolutely imperative for me to maintain a constant question mark over [acting],” Day-Lewis said in 2006. “It’s essential to continually question the rightness of what one is doing in life, and the place one occupies within it.”
