Daniel Day-Lewis

• 1. Introduction

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  Daniel Day-Lewis was born on the 29th of April 1957 in Kensington, London, to a poet and an actress. Before most people had ever heard his name, he was already inhabiting other people's lives so completely that crew members on film sets found themselves spoon-feeding him and hurling cold water at him on his own request. He has won the Academy Award for Best Actor three times, a record no actor has matched. He has retired from acting twice, once to become an apprentice shoe-maker in Florence. And in 1989, during a performance of Hamlet at the National Theatre, he walked off stage mid-scene, saying he had seen the ghost of his own dead father, and never returned to the stage again. What drives a man to vanish into roles so thoroughly that his health suffers? What kind of childhood produces an actor who credits his first great performance as mastering the accent of south London children so he would stop being bullied? And what does it mean when the person widely considered the greatest film actor alive calls that reputation "daft"?

• 2. A Family Steeped in Art

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  Cecil Day-Lewis, Daniel's father, was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, the year Daniel turned eleven. Cecil was born in the Irish town of Ballintubbert, County Laois, of Protestant Anglo-Irish descent, yet spent nearly his entire life in England from the age of two. Daniel's mother, Jill Balcon, was an actress whose own father, Sir Michael Balcon, built his career as head of Ealing Studios, shaping what would become the British film industry in its early decades. The BAFTA for Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema is presented every year in Balcon's memory. Daniel's maternal ancestors were Ashkenazi Jews who arrived in England from Latvia and Poland in the late nineteenth century, giving him a heritage that cut across Irish, English, and Jewish lines. His older sister, Tamasin, later became a television chef and food critic. The family moved from Kensington to Croom's Hill in Greenwich when Daniel was two, with a stop in Port Clarence, County Durham along the way. Growing up in south London meant navigating a world where being both Jewish and "posh" invited bullying from local children. Day-Lewis responded by learning the local accent and mannerisms with such precision that he later credited this as his first convincing performance. In May 1972, Cecil Day-Lewis died of pancreatic cancer at Lemmons, the north London home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where the family had gone to rest. Daniel was fourteen.

• 3. Learning the Craft

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  In 1968, Daniel's parents sent him as a boarder to Sevenoaks School in Kent after concluding that his behaviour was too wild for home life. There he encountered the three interests that would shape the rest of his life: woodworking, acting, and fishing. His disdain for the school grew, and after two years he transferred to Bedales in Petersfield, Hampshire, a school with a more relaxed and creative ethos where his sister was already a pupil. At fourteen, he made his film debut in Sunday Bloody Sunday, playing an uncredited child vandal. He described the experience as "heaven" for being paid two pounds to vandalise expensive cars parked outside his local church. By the time he left Bedales in 1975, his unruly years were behind him, but a cabinet-maker apprenticeship he applied for rejected him for lack of experience. He was accepted instead at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where he studied for three years alongside Miranda Richardson. His acting teacher there, John Hartoch, would later recall: "There was something about him even then. He was quiet and polite, but he was clearly focused on his acting. He had a burning quality. He seemed to have something burning beneath the surface." Hartoch described a student production of a play called Class Enemy as the moment it became obvious to the staff that they had someone special. Day-Lewis also understudied Pete Postlethwaite at Bristol, a professional relationship that would resume years later when both men starred in In the Name of the Father.

• 4. Breakthrough and the Brit Pack

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  My Beautiful Laundrette, released in 1985 and directed by Stephen Frears from a script by Hanif Kureishi, placed Day-Lewis as a young gay Englishman in an interracial relationship set against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher's London. It ranks 50th in the BFI's list of the 100 greatest British films of the 20th century, and it is the first of three Day-Lewis films to appear on that list. The same year, he played Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View, opposite Helena Bonham Carter, a character entirely unlike his Laundrette role: proper, upper-class, constrained by Edwardian social codes. Day-Lewis was drawn to the contrast between extremes. By 1987, he had assumed leading-man status in Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, playing a Czech surgeon whose emotional detachment begins to crack. During the eight-month shoot, Day-Lewis learned Czech, and for the first time refused to break character on or off the set for the entire shooting schedule. He and a group of young British actors of the era, including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tim Roth, and Bruce Payne, were labelled the "Brit Pack" by the press. The label acknowledged a generational shift in British acting, though Day-Lewis was already separating himself from any group by the depth of his individual preparation.

• 5. Method at Its Extreme

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  Christy Brown, the subject of Jim Sheridan's 1989 film My Left Foot, was a writer and painter born with cerebral palsy who could control only his left foot. Day-Lewis prepared by making frequent visits to the Sandymount School Clinic in Dublin, forming friendships with people with disabilities, some of whom had no speech. During filming, he remained in character at all times: he was moved around the set in a wheelchair, crew members were required to spoon-feed him, and it was rumoured he broke two ribs from maintaining a hunched position in the wheelchair for weeks. Day-Lewis denied the rib story at the 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, though he never denied the broader lengths he went to. The performance won him the Academy Award for Best Actor and the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. For In the Name of the Father, he played Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, wrongfully convicted of an IRA bombing. He lost two stone and two pounds for the role, maintained a Northern Irish accent continuously through the shoot, spent stretches in a prison cell, and insisted that crew members throw cold water at him and verbally abuse him. For Gangs of New York, he hired circus performers to teach him to throw knives, and when he was diagnosed with pneumonia during filming he refused a warmer coat and resisted treatment on the grounds that it was not period-appropriate. Barry McGuigan, the former boxing world champion who trained Day-Lewis for The Boxer, said: "If you eliminate the top ten middleweights in Britain, any of the other guys Daniel could have gone in and fought."

• 6. Hamlet and the Ghost

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  In 1989, Day-Lewis returned to the stage for the first time in years, taking the title role in Hamlet at the National Theatre in London under director Richard Eyre. He had spoken of the "demons" in the role in the weeks leading up to the breakdown. Then, during a performance, he collapsed during the scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears. He began sobbing uncontrollably and refused to return to the stage. Jeremy Northam stepped in that night; Ian Charleson formally replaced him for the rest of the run. The official explanation was exhaustion. Day-Lewis offered a different account: "I need to believe in the value of what I'm doing." He later said that he had seen the ghost of his own father, clarifying that this was more a metaphor than a hallucination. "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." The media attention that followed contributed to his eventual move from England to Ireland in the mid-1990s, seeking privacy that his increasing fame had stripped away. He has held dual British and Irish citizenship since 1993, and has maintained a home in Annamoe, County Wicklow, since 1997.

• 7. Three Oscars and Two Retirements

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  There Will Be Blood, released in 2007, brought Day-Lewis his second Academy Award for Best Actor, for his portrayal of oil tycoon Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!. When he accepted the award, he dedicated it to Heath Ledger, who had died five days earlier, calling Ledger's performance in Brokeback Mountain "unique, perfect". In winning, he joined Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson as the only Best Actor winners to receive Oscars in two non-consecutive decades. Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's 2012 biopic, required a year of preparation that Day-Lewis had specifically requested. He read over one hundred books on Abraham Lincoln, worked with a make-up artist to achieve a physical likeness, and asked British crew members who shared his native accent not to speak with him. The film grossed over 275 million dollars worldwide. At the 85th Academy Awards, Day-Lewis became the first performer ever to win three Best Actor Oscars. His teacher John Hartoch, reflecting on that achievement, said: "He's never courted fame, and as a result, he's never had his private life impeached upon by the press. He is still a great craftsman." His second retirement came after Phantom Thread in 2017. In a November interview that year, he said: "I need to believe in the value of what I'm doing. The work can seem vital, irresistible, even. And if an audience believes it, that should be good enough for me. But, lately, it isn't." Then, on the 1st of October 2024, it was announced he would return for Anemone, a film co-written with and directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis, which premiered at the 2025 New York Film Festival.