Daniel Day-Lewis
Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is an English actor. Often described as one of the greatest actors in the history of cinema, he is best known for intense method acting portrayed with eccentric characters in auteurs' films. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including a record three Academy Awards for Best Actor, as well as four BAFTAs, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and two Golden Globes. In 2014, Day-Lewis received a knighthood for services to drama.
Born and raised in London, Day-Lewis excelled on stage at the National Youth Theatre before being accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which he attended for three years. Despite his traditional training at the Bristol Old Vic, he is considered a method actor, known for his constant devotion to and research of his roles. Protective of his private life, he rarely grants interviews and makes very few public appearances.
Day-Lewis shifted between theatre and film for most of the early 1980s, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company and playing Romeo Montague in Romeo and Juliet and Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Playing the title role in Hamlet at the National Theatre in London in 1989, he left the stage midway through a performance after breaking down during a scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears before him—this was his last appearance on the stage. After supporting film roles in Gandhi and The Bounty, he earned acclaim for his breakthrough performances in My Beautiful Laundrette, A Room with a View, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
He earned three Academy Awards for Best Actor for his roles as Christy Brown in My Left Foot, oil tycoon Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, and Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln. He was Oscar-nominated for In the Name of the Father, Gangs of New York, and Phantom Thread. Other notable films include The Last of the Mohicans, The Age of Innocence, The Crucible, and The Boxer. He retired from acting twice, from 1997 to 2000, when he took up a new profession as an apprentice shoe-maker in Italy, and from 2017 to 2024. In 2025 he starred in and co-wrote Anemone, directed by his son Ronan.
Early life and education
Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis was born on 29 April 1957 in Kensington, London, the second child of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis and his second wife, actress Jill Balcon. His older sister, Tamasin Day-Lewis, is a television chef and food critic. His father, who was born in the Irish town of Ballintubbert, County Laois, was of Protestant Anglo-Irish descent, lived in England from age two, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968. Day-Lewis's mother was Jewish; her Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors were immigrants to England in the late 19th century, from Latvia and Poland. Day-Lewis's maternal grandfather, Sir Michael Balcon, became the head of Ealing Studios, helping develop the new British film industry. The BAFTA for Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema is presented every year in honour of Balcon's memory.Two years after Day-Lewis's birth, he moved with his family to Croom's Hill in Greenwich via Port Clarence, County Durham. He and his older sister did not see much of their older two half-brothers, who had been teenagers when Day-Lewis's father divorced their mother. Living in Greenwich, Day-Lewis had to deal with tough south London children. At this school, he was bullied for being both Jewish and "posh". He mastered the local accent and mannerisms, and credits that as being his first convincing performance. Later in life, he has been known to speak of himself as a disorderly character in his younger years, often in trouble for shoplifting and other petty crimes.
In 1968, Day-Lewis's parents, finding his behaviour to be too wild, sent him as a boarder to the independent Sevenoaks School in Kent. At the school, he was introduced to his three most prominent interests: woodworking, acting, and fishing. However, his disdain for the school grew, and after two years at Sevenoaks, he was transferred to another independent school, Bedales in Petersfield, Hampshire. His sister was already a pupil there, and it had a more relaxed and creative ethos. He made his film debut at age 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.
For a few weeks in 1972, the Day-Lewis family lived at Lemmons, the north London home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Day-Lewis's father had pancreatic cancer, and Howard invited the family to Lemmons as a place they could use to rest and recuperate. His father died there in May that year. By the time he left Bedales in 1975, Day-Lewis's unruly attitude had diminished and he needed to make a career choice. Although he had excelled on stage at the National Youth Theatre in London, he applied for a five-year apprenticeship as a cabinet maker, though he was rejected due to a lack of experience. He was accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which he attended for three years along with Miranda Richardson, eventually performing at the Bristol Old Vic itself. At one point he played understudy to Pete Postlethwaite, with whom he would later co-star in the film In the Name of the Father.
John Hartoch, Day-Lewis's acting teacher at Bristol Old Vic, recalled:
Career
1980s
During the early 1980s, 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 had a small part in the film Gandhi as Colin, a South African street thug who racially bullies the title character. In late 1982, he had his big theatre break when he took over the lead in Another Country, which had premiered in late 1981. Next, he took on a supporting role as the conflicted, but ultimately loyal, first mate in The Bounty. He next joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream.In 1985, Day-Lewis gave his first critically acclaimed performance playing a young gay English man in an interracial relationship with a Pakistani youth in the film My Beautiful Laundrette. Directed by Stephen Frears, and written by Hanif Kureishi, the film is set in 1980s London during Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister. It is the first of three Day-Lewis films to appear in the BFI's 100 greatest British films of the 20th century, ranking 50th.
Day-Lewis gained further public notice that year with A Room with a View, based on the novel by E. M. Forster. Set in the Edwardian period of turn-of-the-20th-century England, he portrayed an entirely different character: Cecil Vyse, the proper upper-class fiancé of the main character Lucy Honeychurch.
In 1987, Day-Lewis assumed leading man status by starring in Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which he portrayed a Czech surgeon whose hyperactive 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. During this period, Day-Lewis was regarded as "one of Britain's most exciting young actors". He and other young British actors of the time, such as Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tim Roth, and Bruce Payne, were dubbed the "Brit Pack".
Day-Lewis progressed his personal version of method acting in 1989 with his performance as Christy Brown in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot. It won him numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor and BAFTA Award for Best Actor. Brown, known as a writer and painter, was born with cerebral palsy, and was able to control only his left foot. Day-Lewis prepared for the role by making 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, he again refused 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 curse at having 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. Crew members were also required to spoon-feed him. It was rumoured that he had broken two ribs during filming from assuming a hunched-over position in his wheelchair for so many weeks, something he denied years later at the 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
File:Royal National Theatre.jpg|thumb|Day-Lewis played Hamlet in Richard Eyre's 1989 production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, London, his final appearance on the stage.
Day-Lewis returned to the stage in 1989 to work with Richard Eyre, as the title character in Hamlet at the National Theatre, London, but during a performance collapsed during the scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears before him. He began sobbing uncontrollably, and refused to go back on stage; he was replaced by Jeremy Northam, who gave a triumphant performance. Ian Charleson formally replaced Day-Lewis for the rest of the run. Earlier in the run, Day-Lewis had talked of the "demons" in the role, and for weeks he threw himself passionately into the part. Although the incident was officially attributed to exhaustion, Day-Lewis said he had seen the ghost of his own father. He later explained that this was more of 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." He has not appeared on stage since. The media attention following his breakdown on-stage contributed to his decision to eventually move from England to Ireland in the mid-1990s, to regain a sense of privacy amidst his increasing fame.