Daniel Day-Lewis – Part 1
Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis (born 29 April 1957) is an English actor. His portrayals of Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989) and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007) won Academy and BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, and Screen Actors Guild as well as Golden Globe Awards for the latter. His role as Bill “The Butcher” Cutting in Gangs of New York (2002) earned him the BAFTA Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Sean Penn remarked: “He may very well be the greatest actor ever recorded to the screen.”
Day-Lewis, who grew up in London, is the son of actress Jill Balcon and the Anglo-Irish Poet Laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis. Despite his training in the classical presentational acting style at the Bristol Old Vic, he is a method actor, known for his constant devotion to and research of his roles. Often, he will remain completely in character for the duration of the shooting schedule of his films, even to the point of adversely affecting his health. He is known as one of the most selective actors in the film industry, having starred in only five films since 1997, with as many as five years between roles.
In 1968, Day-Lewis’s parents, finding his behaviour to be too wild, sent him to the independent Sevenoaks School in Kent, as a boarder. His disdain for the school grew, and after two years at Sevenoaks, he was transferred to another independent school, Bedales in Petersfield, which his sister attended, and which had a more relaxed and creative ethos. The transfer led to his film debut at the age of 14 in Sunday Bloody Sunday in which he played a vandal in an uncredited role. He described the experience as “heaven”, for getting paid £2 to vandalise expensive cars parked outside his local church.
Leaving Bedales in 1975, his unruly attitude had faded and he needed to make a career choice. Although he had excelled on stage at the National Youth Theatre, he decided to become a cabinet-maker, applying for a five-year apprenticeship. However, due to lack of experience, he was not accepted. He then applied (and was accepted) at the Bristol Old Vic Thetare School, which he attended for three years, eventually performing at the Bristol Old Vic. At one point he played understudy to Pete Postlethwaite, opposite whom he would later play in In the Name of the Father.
During the early ’80s, Day-Lewis worked in theatre and television including Frost in May and How Many Miles to Babylon? for the BBC. Eleven years after his film debut, Day-Lewis continued his film career with a small part in Gandhi (1982) as Colin, a street thug who bullies the title character, only to be immediately chastised by his high-strung mother. In late 1982 he had his big theatre break when he took over the lead in Another Country. The following year, he had a supporting role as the conflicted, but ultimately loyal first mate in The Bounty, after which he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Next he played a gay man in an interracial relationship in the film My Beautiful Laundrette. Day-Lewis gained further public notice with A Room with a View (1986), in which he portrayed Cecil Vyse, the proper upper-class fiancé of the main character (played by Helena Bonham Carter).
In 1987, Day-Lewis achieved leading-man status by starring in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, co-starring Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche, as a Czech surgeon whose hyperactive and purely physical sex life is thrown into disarray when he allows himself to become emotionally involved with a woman. During the eight-month shoot he learned Czech and first began to refuse to break character on or off the set for the entire shooting schedule.
Day-Lewis threw his personal version of “method acting” into full throttle in 1989 with his performance as Christy Brown in Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot which garnered him numerous awards. He prepared for his role by frequent visits to Sandymount School Clinic in Dublin, where he formed friendships with several people with disabilities, some of whom had no speech. During filming, his eccentricities came to the fore, due to his refusal to break character. Playing a severely paralysed character on screen, off screen Day-Lewis had to be moved around the set in his wheelchair, and crew members would have to lift him over camera and lighting wires, all so that he might gain insight into all aspects of Brown’s life, including the embarrassments. He broke two ribs during filming from assuming a hunched-over position in his wheelchair for so many weeks.
Day-Lewis returned to the stage in 1989 to work with Richard Eyre, in Hamlet at the National Theatre, but collapsed in the middle of a scene where the ghost of Hamlet’s father first appears to his son. He began sobbing uncontrollably and refused to go back on stage; he was replaced by Ian Charleson before a then-unknown Jeremy Northam finished the production’s run. Although the incident was officially attributed to exhaustion, one rumour following the incident was that Day-Lewis had seen the ghost of his own father. He confirmed on the British celebrity chat show Parkinson, that this was true. He has not appeared on stage since.
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