When Daniel Day-Lewis digs himself into a 50ft hole at the start of his latest
film, There Will Be Blood, it will seem like a metaphor for one of his
strange behaviour patterns. Typically, these are triggered by some
regrettable action – think of the actor’s faxed goodbye to his pregnant
girlfriend Isabelle Adjani (which she has denied). After a long withdrawal
into privacy, his grudging return to the limelight is usually followed by
obsessive preparation for a new role. The cycle culminates in a shower of
victory laurels.
Day-Lewis, hailed as the Olivier of his generation, is now in the latter
phase. Having just won a Golden Globe as best actor for his portrayal of a
satanic oilman in Blood, he is favourite to pick up a Bafta against
competition from James McAvoy in Atonement and George Clooney for Michael
Clayton. An Oscar is also said to be his for the taking – Johnny Depp and
mutinous Hollywood scriptwriters permitting. The film is only his fourth in
the past 10 years.
The 50-year-old star’s image as a “mad recluse” is occasionally refreshed by
reports of such eccentricities as mending people’s shoes in a Florentine
back street. But it’s mostly cobblers, Day-Lewis claimed recently: how could
anyone be a recluse living in a house full of children?
He shares a Georgian mansion in the Wicklow mountains of Ireland with his wife
Rebecca and their two sons, Ronan, 9, and Cashel, 5. Their small hand prints
are tattooed on his arms. He has a 12-year-old son, Gabriel, from his
six-year relationship with Adjani. It is in this rural fastness, gazing out
from his book-lined study or cycling in the hills with his sons, that he
gathered the inspiration to tackle his latest draining role. “The view from
the window is so staggering,” he told his friend, the writer Hanif Kureishi
whose My Beautiful Laundrette gave him his breakthrough film role in 1985.
“Months go by: I’m just absorbed by the landscape.”
As for being called mad, he maintains that it’s an Irish compliment. Two years
of meticulous preparation went into his role of Daniel Plainview, the
entrepreneur who begins as a lone miner digging for gold in the California
mountains in 1898 and declines into a rich monster. Day-Lewis found the
flavour of the times in the moving letters written by miners to their loved
ones: “Often they were shipping clerks or merchants or teachers who were
living like animals.”
Day-Lewis’s physical commitment to inhabit the characters he portrays is
intense: to some he is a British equivalent of Robert De Niro. For his
Oscar-winning performance as the quadriplegic Christy Brown in My Left Foot,
he adopted a wheelchair routine and taught himself to paint with his foot.
As the woodsman Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, he learnt to skin
animals and fire a Kentucky musket. For the harrowing scenes during In the
Name of the Father he had himself locked in a cell and interrogated, while
for his role as a psychopathic butcher in The Gangs of New York he took
lessons from butchers in Peckham, southeast London.
His acting gift is a mystery that he refrains from talking about, other than
to observe: “Each piece of work requires that you imagine a world and then
you try to understand that through the experience of a human being that
isn’t yourself.”
The actor’s dark mane is lightly dusted with grey these days and his love of
motorbikes is one of the few signs of his wild youth. Kureishi recalled
first meeting “this tall, rather brutal but beautiful boy” with whom he
would go out drinking. In his view, Day-Lewis has the “mixture of stillness
and underlying terror” that marks out great actors, giving the impression
that “this man could go bonkers any time”.
Day-Lewis’s refusal to break character while on set has resulted in accounts
of him upsetting fellow actors. One is reported to have quit There Will Be
Blood, complaining that the star was “crazy and intimidating”. Another
claimed that in a fight scene that got out of hand, Day-Lewis hit him with
bowling balls.
They said Day-Lewis went bonkers when he collapsed halfway through a
theatrical run of Hamlet in 1990, claiming that he had seen the ghost of his
father, Cecil Day-Lewis, the former poet laureate. He never trod the boards
again. He later explained: “I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment
in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father . . . but that wasn’t
the reason I had to leave the stage. I had to leave the stage because I was
an empty vessel. I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.”
He was never close to his father, whose need for remoteness pushed away his
son’s love: “You had to knock on his door. You had to tiptoe past his
study.” Plagued by gallstones and heart problems, the poet succumbed to
cancer when Day-Lewis was 15: “I missed him while he was alive and even more
after he died.” He came to realise that he shared some of his father’s
traits, such as “the predilection for going at the thing that you find
fearful”.
He was vilified for the caddish manner of his split with Adjani in 1995. He
admitted later that he had “failed myself and people that I loved” but was
wounded to be depicted “like an antichrist”.
In 1996, while working on the film version of the play The Crucible, he
visited the home of its author Arthur Miller, where he was introduced to his
actress daughter Rebecca. They married that November. She coaxed him out of
semi-retirement to play the lead role of a dying man in her film The Ballad
of Jack and Rose, which received mixed reviews despite almost universal
praise for his performance.
Day-Lewis was born in the front room of 96 Campden Hill Road, Kensington, in
west London, on April 29, 1957. He inherited his father’s rugged good looks,
while his black hair came from his mother, the actress Jill Balcon, whose
family were Baltic Jews. Much of her early work was done for Ealing Studios
which her father, Michael Balcon, headed from 1937 to 1959. Day-Lewis’s
older sister, Tamasin, became a documentary film-maker and a television chef.
Growing up in Greenwich, south London, Day-Lewis toughened up rapidly.
“Everyone was into gangs and scrapping. I was in a gang. I had a couple of
protectors and if I got a belt, they made sure someone else got three.” To
his sister’s horror he adopted a working-class accent as a defence – “I was
Irish and Jewish and from a different class to most of the kids.”
To keep him out of trouble his father sent him to board at Sevenoaks school in
Kent, a place he found “alien and unattractive”. He rebelled, often in
trouble for shoplifting, drinking, smoking and dallying with girls.
Yet he discovered two affinities: acting and woodwork. His pièce de résistance
was a table tennis table that did good service in the family basement for
years. Later he produced elegant furniture.
At the age of 12 he transferred to Bedales, a liberal school where he spent
“the happiest days of my life”. He began to show promise as an actor, at one
point playing the dashing young prince Florizel in Shakespeare’s The
Winter’s Tale. The girl pupils called him Daniel Day-Pinup and he had a
decade-long relationship with a girl in his year, Sarah Campbell.
Although taken on for a spell at the National Youth Theatre, he found
something “seedy” and “distasteful” about backstage life. Instead, he
applied for an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker but was rejected because of
his lack of experience.
Then, overcoming his scruples about the stage, he joined the Bristol Old Vic
theatre school, eventually performing at the senior theatre. Peter
Postlethwaite, the actor, later recalled: “We saw all this pyrotechnic work
going on and thought: oh, no, not another one of these! Can’t we lose him
somewhere?” Postlethwaite’s tune changed by 1993 when, playing second fiddle
to Day-Lewis, he was Oscar-nominated for In the Name of the Father.
A stint with the Little Theatre Company set Day-Lewis up to join the West End
hit Another Country, which had spawned such stars as Kenneth Branagh, Rupert
Everett and Colin Firth. In 1983 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to
play Romeo, whom he described as “a w*****”.
After his walk-out from the National Theatre’s Hamlet, he felt compelled to
contest the traditional notion that film was a “Faustian sell-out”. Actors
went to work in movies because it was a medium that connected with the
public, he insisted. Much as he tried to love the theatre, “the fact is that
most of the time when I go to the theatre I am bored to distraction”.
He now gives every impression of being a contented man: “I’m as happy as could
be, either looking out of the window or walking through that landscape.”
Once again, it will take a brave person to lure him from his idyll.
How unsettling it must be to be examined on such a personal level every time you excel as DDL does. The intense scrutiny that this man must face for simply being 'terrific' is an injustice.
My understanding is that he is a very smart fellow with an amazing depth of character and innate understanding of the human spirit. He has given us the gift of himself over and over again and for that, I am thankful. It would seem that the 'mad genius' theory is crap. I believe that he is coming from a place very deep within that is love. Really, what could be simpler. He has 'got' it.
susan watkins, georgetown, texas
he is pure genius!
ceil, bensalem, PA,
One of very few actors who will be remembered long after he is gone. Paul Charney
Paul Charney, London, UK
Well... he doesn't look like me as much as Tom Cruise does, who by the way can stop trying to be 'me' any-time now.
Dan, Iowa,
A publisher friend whispered in my ear that Day-Lewis is presently busy with an autographical work which reveals much about the the public perception of his idiosyncrasies.
Apparently, despite his unconvential upbringing, he remains a man of principles and objects to being coerced by parties with ulterior motives to accept roles created by them, to improve their own rotten tarnished images.
It's rumoured that he would rather camp in a one-man tent pitched on a silver mansion trailer, with a half-brick under the right wheel and on a downhill slope to a cliff, than be part of a family where children were abused on a daily basis by a "Super Power" - by association, he'd lose all sense of self respect playing such a role.
I gained the impression, that it wouldn't necessarily take a brave person to "lure him from idyll", just the right person, representing the right values.
C Markus, Glasgow, Scotland