Daniel Day-Lewis

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Biography

Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis (born 29 April 1957) is famous as one of the most highly acclaimed actors of his generation. Daniel has earned numerous awards, including three Academy Awards for Best Actor for his portrayals of Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989), Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007), and Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln (2012), making him the only male actor in history to have three best lead actor category wins, and one of only three male actors to win three Oscars. He has also won four BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, three Critics' Choice Movie Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. In June 2014, he received a knighthood for services to drama. He is highly selective about his roles, having starred in only five films since 1998, with as many as five years between roles.

Daniel holds both British and Irish citizenship.

Daniel Day-Lewis was born and raised in London, and comes from famous and accomplished family on both sides. He is the son of the famous poet Cecil Day-Lewis and English actress Jill Balcon. His father, who was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland, was of Protestant Anglo-Irish and English background, lived in England from the age of two, and later became the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

Daniel's mother was Jewish, and his maternal grandparents' families had emigrated to England from Latvia and Poland. His maternal grandfather, Michael Balcon, an important figure in the history of British cinema, was the head of Ealing Studios.

Two years after his birth, the family moved to Croom's Hill, Greenwich, south-east London, where Daniel grew up along with his older sister, Tamasin, who became a documentary filmmaker and television chef.

Living in Greenwich, Day-Lewis found himself among tough South London children, and, being partially Jewish and "posh", he was often bullied. In his younger years he was often in trouble for shoplifting and other petty crimes.

In 1968, his parents sent him to the independent Sevenoaks School in Kent as a boarder. At the school, he was introduced to his three most prominent interests: woodworking, acting, and fishing.

After two years at Sevenoaks, he was transferred to another independent school, Bedales in Petersfield, Hampshire, which his sister attended, and which had a more relaxed and creative ethos.

In 1971 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 and was paid £2 to vandalise expensive cars parked outside his local church.

For a few weeks in 1972, he and his parents and sister lived at Lemmons, the north London home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Cecil Day-Lewis had cancer and Howard invited the family to Lemmons as a place they could use to rest and recuperate. Cecil died there in May that year.

Daniel left Bedales in 1975. He had excelled on stage at the National Youth Theatre, before being accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which he attended for three years.

During the early 1980s, Daniel worked in theatre and television, and his film career continued with a small part in Gandhi (1982) as Colin, a South African street thug who racially bullies the title character.

More and bigger roles followed, and in 1987 Daniel starred as leading man in Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Daniel ended his stage career in 1989, after he had an emotional breakdown in the middle of his performance as Hamlet. 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. He became an Irish citizen in 1993.

During this time he had a relationship with French actress Isabelle Adjani, which lasted six years and eventually ended after a split and reconciliation. Their son

1. Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis was born in 1995 in New York City, several months after the relationship ended.

In 1995 Daniel Day Lewis met Rebecca Miller, an accomplished actress and director, and younger daughter of the famous playwright Arthur Miller, while she was working on her first writer-director film, Angela. The couple reconnected in 1996 on the set of The Crucible, where Rebecca was shooting production stills of the filming of her father's play, in which Daniel starred. They married a few months later in a small ceremony in Vermont. One important link in their relationship is that both Rebecca and Daniel had come from literary families. The couple has two sons,

1. Ronan (or Roman) Cal Day-Lewis (born 1998) and
2. Cashel Blake Day-Lewis (born 2002)

Daniel took a five-year leave of absence from acting by going into "semi-retirement" and returning to his old passion of woodworking. He moved to Florence, Italy, where he apprenticed as a shoemaker. During this period he remained in private family seclusion, saying "it was a period of my life that I had a right to, without any intervention of that kind."

Daniel's comeback came in the multiple Academy Award-nominated film Gangs of New York (2002), directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Harvey Weinstein.

The family lives in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland, and Roxbury, Connecticut and New York.

Sources

• Wikipedia article: Daniel Day-Lewis

• Susan C. W. Abbotson. Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work p 432