Biography
Friends and Family
Tamasin Day-Lewis
[Sister]
::
Jill Balcon
[Mother]
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Cecil Day-Lewis
[Father]
Trivia and Quotes
Quotes
 For my sense of continuity, I suppose I work in a certain way. But it goes beyond that. It`s really about the sense of joy you have in having worked hard to imagine and discover and - one hopes - to create a world, an illusion of a world that other people might believe in because you believe in it yourself, a form of self-delusion. After achieving that, it seems far crazier to jump in and out of that world that you`ve gone to such pains to create. And it wouldn`t be my wish to do that, because I enjoy being in there. - On why he takes long breaks between films. I am rather surprised that I haven`t made more stories about my own country but it is a mistake to suggest that the biggest influence on my life in terms of movies has been America. It was and remains Ken Loach and his whole body of work, not that I have ever worked with him. There is something unique and pure about the way he works, without a taint on it. His beliefs have remained unwavering since he made Cathy Come Home.
I do have dual citizenship, but I think of England as my country. I miss London very much but I couldn`t live there because there came a time when I needed to be private and was forced to be public by the press. I couldn`t deal with it.
I have no illusion about the fact that I`m an Englishman living in Ireland. Even though I do straddle both worlds and I`m very proud to be able to carry both passports. But I do know where I come from. I particularly miss south-east London - the front-lines of Deptford and Lewisham and New Cross and Charlton - because that`s my patch.
I was very influenced by Ken Loach`s work from the moment I saw "Kes" when I was a kid. It still remains for me one of the most powerful pieces of work ever. Before that, there was "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", "This Sporting Life" and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", which all expressed a new British social realism. Undoubtedly, they opened up the possibility of examining British life in a new way. That was probably the most important film experience I had.
Whenever we reach what we think are the boundaries of our endurance, you know ten minutes later you`re thinking: I could have done that - like in any athletic pursuit - I could have gone further than that; I could have jumped higher.
(on applying to theater school, the Bristol Old Vic) I picked just one because then it would be a sign from the gods if it was not meant to be.
(on his reluctance to expose the mechanics of his acting process) It`s not that I want to pull the shutters down. It`s just that people have such a misconception about what it is I do. They think the character comes from staying in the wheelchair or being locked in the jail or whatever extravagant thing they choose to focus their fantasies on. Somehow, it always seems to have a self-flagellatory aspect to it. But that`s just the superficial stuff. Most of the movies that I do are leading me toward a life that is utterly mysterious to me. My chief goal is to find a way to make that life meaningful to other people.
I don`t particularly like westerns as a genre, but I do love certain westerns. High Noon (1952) means a lot to me - I love the purity and the honesty, I love Gary Cooper in that film, the idea of the last man standing. I do not like John Wayne: I find it hard to watch him. I just never took to him. And I don`t like James Stewart as a cowboy. I love him, but just not as a cowboy; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) is one of my favorite films. I love Frank Capra. I love Preston Sturges. But we`re talking about westerns. ... I have always admired Clint Eastwood`s westerns. The spaghetti westerns were a great discovery. And Pale Rider (1985). As a child, the John Ford film _Cheyenne Autumn_ made a big impression on me. And _Five Easy Pieces_. It`s not really a western, but it is about the possibilities that can be found in the West. Jack Nicholson is sublime in that film, just sublime. It`s the most stultifying portrait of middle-class life. You want to flee from that world and head anywhere less civilized. Which is, of course, the appeal of the West: It`s not tamed yet.
I saw Taxi Driver (1976) five or six times in the first week, and I was astonished by its sheer visceral beauty. I just kept going back - I didn`t know America, but that was a glimpse of what America might be, and I realized that, contrary to expectation, I wanted to tell American stories.
I used to go to all-night screenings of (Clint Eastwood)`s movies. I`d stagger out at 5 in the morning, trying to be loose-limbed and mean and taciturn.
I was deeply unsettled by the script [of There Will Be Blood (2007)]. For me, that is a sure sign. If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you`ve already taken a step toward it. When I`m drawn to something, I take a resolute step backward, and I ask myself if I can really serve this story as well as it needs to be served. If I don`t think I can do that, no matter how appealing, I will decline. What finally takes over, what took over with this movie, is an illusion of inevitability. I think: Can this really be true? Is this happening to me again? Is there no way to avoid this?
My ambition for many years was to be involved in work that was utterly compelling to me, regardless of the consequences. But I worried a lot as a young man about where such and such a thing might take me; you`re encouraged to think that way. You`re supposed to build a career for yourself. But there`s no part of me that was able to do that. And thank God I was able to recognize it before I sort of went grey with anxiety.
My love for American movies was like a secret that I carried around with me. I always knew I could straddle different worlds. I`d grown up in two different worlds and if you can grow up in two different worlds, you can occupy four. Or six. Why put a limit on it?
Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies. We were all encouraged to believe that the classics of the theater were the fiery hoops through which you`d have to pass if you were going to have any self-esteem as a performer. It never occurred to me that that was the case. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible. England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter. The great tradition of liberalism in England is essentially a sponge that absorbs all possibility of change. America looked different to me: the idea of America as a place of infinite possibilities was defined for me through the movies. I`m glad I did the classical work that I did, but it just wasn`t for me. I`m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that`s the most obvious.
[on creating a characterization] The intention is always the same. To try to discover life in its entirety, or at least create for yourself the illusion that you have, which might give you some chance of convincing other people of it. It`s the same thing each time, but it requires totally different work in the process of achieving that. You are set on a path that`s strewn with obstacles, but getting over them is the joy of the work. So it`s impossible to think in terms of difficulty: it all seems utterly impossible, but the pleasure is in trying to forge ahead anyway.
(on obtaining Irish citizenship) I dare say it was still considered to be an abandonment of England A betrayal! A heresy! It is not expected that someone from my background will leave England. But I`ve committed so many heresies that there`s no sense in not making the final gesture.
(on researching his role as Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)) Back then men would get the fever. They would keep digging, always with the idea that next time they`ll throw the dice and the money will fall out of the sky. It killed a lot of men, it broke others, still more were reduced to despair and poverty, but they still believed in the promise of the West.
(on researching his role as Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)) I like to learn about things. It was just a great time trying to conceive of the impossibility of that thing. I didn`t know anything about mining at the turn of the century in America. My boarding school in Kent didn`t exactly teach that.
(on researching his role as Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)) I read a lot of correspondence dating from that period. Decent middle-class lives with wives and children were abandoned to pursue this elusive possibility. They were bank clerks and shipping agents and teachers. They all fled West for a sniff of cheap money. And they made it up as they went along. No one knew how to drill for oil. Initially, they scooped it out of the ground in saucepans. It was man at his most animalistic, sifting through filth to find bright, sparkly things.
(on visiting the west of Ireland every year since childhood) From the day we arrived here, my sense of Ireland`s importance has never diminished. Everything here seemed exotic to us. Just the sound of the west of Ireland in a person`s voice can affect me deeply.
(on working as a teen-age extra in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)) I was just a local kid. I got to come out of the church, the same church where I sang in the choir, and scratch up a row of cars - a Jag, a Bentley - parked in front. I thought, I get paid for this! Years later, I saw the director, John Schlesinger, at the Edinburgh festival, where we were showing My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). I play a hooligan punk in that too. I said to Schlesinger, `I guess I haven`t progressed much.`
(replying to a compliment on his articulation) I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves. Maybe it`s a middle-class British hang-up, but I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.
I came from the educated middle class but I identified with the working classes. Those were the people I looked up to. The lads whose fathers worked on the docks or in shipping yards or were shopkeepers. I knew that I wasn`t part of that world, but I was intrigued by it. They had a different way of communicating. People who delight in conversation are often using that as a means to not say what is on their minds. When I became interested in theater, the work I admired was being done by working-class writers. It was often about the inarticulate. I later saw that same thing in Robert De Niro`s early work - it was the most sublime struggle of a man trying to express himself. There was such poetry in that for me.
It was always assumed that the classics were a good line of work for me because I had a decent voice and the right nose. But anybody who comes from an essentially cynical European society is going to be bewitched by the sheer enthusiasm of the New World. And in America, the articulate use of language is often regarded with suspicion. Especially in the West. Look at the president. He could talk like an educated New Englander if he chose to. Instead, he holds his hands like a man who swings an ax. George W. Bush understands, very astutely, that many of the people who are going to vote for him would regard him less highly if he knew how to put words together. He would no longer be one of them. In Europe, the tradition is one of oratory. But in America, a man`s man is never spendthrift with words. This, of course, is much more appealing in the movies than it is in politics.
The thing that Konstantin Stanislavski lays out is how you do the thing the first time every time - 1,000 times. That`s the idea you`re always searching for.
(after filming The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)) I was hopelessly at sea. I was extremely unhappy most of the time. I think I probably felt I`d made a fundamental error in agreeing to do that movie even though it was the part and the film that everyone wanted to do. And God help us, that is, in itself, a reason not to do something.
(on acting school) For a few years at school I tried to play the roles they wanted me to play, but it became less and less interesting to ponce around the place. Even now, when I sometimes think of doing a play, I think of rehearsal rooms and people hugging and everyone talking over cups of coffee because they are nervous. It`s both very touching and it makes me a little nauseous and claustrophobic. Too much talk. I don`t rehearse at all in film if I can help it. In talking a character through, you define it. And if you define it, you kill it dead.
(on learning to box for The Boxer (1997)) I wanted to see if I loved the sport, because if I didn`t love the sport, I wouldn`t want to tell the story. At its best, boxing is very pure. It requires resilience and heart and self-belief even after it`s been knocked out of you. It`s a certain kind of a test. And it`s hard: the training alone will kill you. And that`s before people start giving you a dig.
(on seeing his face in Hollywood posters for The Last of the Mohicans (1992)) That was, and will always be, difficult for me. The work itself is never anything but pure pleasure, but there`s an awful lot of peripheral stuff that I find it hard to be surrounded by. I like things to be swift, because the energy you have is concentrated and can be fleeting. The great machinery of film can work against that. I have never had a positive reaction to all the stuff that supposedly promotes the film. The thought of it will make me hesitate to do any films at all.
(while filming My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown (1989)) I needed - and I still need - to create a particular environment. I need to find the right kind of silence or light or noise. Whatever is necessary - and it is always different. I know it sounds a little fussy and a little ridiculous, but finding your own rhythm is one of the most important things you can discover about yourself. And you have to observe it. As actors, we`re all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful. So, it`s not without a sense of gratitude that I work. But I couldn`t do this work at all unless I did it in my own rhythm. It became a choice between stopping and taking the time I needed.
I`ve managed to create a sense of banishment in so many different areas of my life. I live in Ireland, not England. I make films in America. And now I`m banished from the theater because I`ve slagged it off so much. And I did the unspeakable thing of fleeing from `Hamlet.`
Laurence Olivier might have been a much better actor on film if he hadn`t had that flippant attitude. [He] was a remarkable actor, but he was entirely missing the point consistently. He felt that film was an inferior form.
Playing the part of Christy Brown left me with a sense of setting myself on a course, of trying to achieve something that was utterly out of reach.
Why would I want to play middle-aged middle-class Englishmen?
[T]here`s a quality of wildness that exists in Ireland that coincides with utter solitude.
(on acting) "If I weren`t allowed this outlet, there wouldn`t be a place for me in society."
(on playing Jack Slevin in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)) I was, as always, wary of taking on the role. This was a man whose soul was torn, and once you`ve adopted that kind of internal conflict, it`s difficult to quiet.
(On Scorsese) Martin doesn`t have to convince me about anything. I can only say that I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Marty once in their lifetime. If you get it twice, it`s a privilege that you don`t necessarily look for but you certainly don`t try to avoid.
Before I start a film, there is always a period where I think, I`m not sure I can do this again. I remember that before I was going to start There Will Be Blood (2007), I wondered why I had said yes. When Martin Scorsese told me about Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002), I wanted to change places with that man. But even then, I did not say yes right away. I kept thinking, I`m not sure I can do this again.
I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it`s no problem for me to believe I`m somebody else.
In every actor`s life, there is a moment when they ask themselves, `Is it really seemly for me to still be doing this?`
Life comes first. What I see in the characters, I first try to see in life.
On disengaging from a character after filming: "There`s a terrible sadness. The last day of shooting is surreal. Your mind, your body, your spirit are not in any way prepared to accept that this experience is coming to an end. In the months that follow the finish of a film, you feel profound emptiness. You`ve devoted so much of your time to unleashing, in an unconscious way, some sort of spiritual turmoil, and even if it`s uncomfortable, no part of you wishes to leave that character behind. The sense of bereavement is such that it can take years before you can put it to rest.
On whether or not he will act in films more often in the future: "Nothing happened over the course of making Gangs of New York that made me think, `Why don`t I do this more often?`"
The West has always been the epicenter of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It`s to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon. We all keep moving toward the sun, wishing to get the last ray of hope before it sets.
Trivia
Dedicated his 2008 Oscar to his grandfather, film studio boss Michael Balcon, his poet father Nicholas Blake (aka Cecil Day-Lewis), and his three sons Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis (born on 9 April 1995), Ronan Cal Day-Lewis (born on 14 June 1998) and Cashel Blake Day-Lewis (born in May 2002).
Got to know his future wife Rebecca Miller while working on the film version of her father Arthur Miller`s play "The Crucible".
Owns homes in the US and Ireland.
The first non-American actor to win two Academy Awards for best actor.
Appears in the novel "That Must Be Yoshino".
Dedicated his 2008 SAG Award to Heath Ledger who was one of his favorite actors.
During The Last of the Mohicans (1992) he built a canoe, learned to track and skin animals, and perfected the use of a 12-pound flintlock gun, which he took everywhere he went, even to a Christmas dinner.
Grandson of Michael Balcon
Holds dual citizenship - British and Irish.
Late in the run of the 1989 production of Hamlet at the National Theatre in London, he reported that he had a strange sensation that he was talking to his father, who died of pancreatic cancer when Daniel was 15. Unnerved, he walked off the stage and never returned. He still doesn`t like to talk about it.
Supports Millwall Football Club.
Trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School where colleagues included Miranda Richardson and Greta Scacchi.
Turned down leading role of Steven Soderbergh film Solaris (2002). The role instead went to George Clooney.
Was director Alex Cox`s second choice for the role of Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (1986). Gary Oldman got the part.
Considered doing an adaptation of "Rose and the Snake" in the early 1990s, but the project fell through. After marrying Rebecca Miller, she convinced him to take the lead role and directed him in the adaptation The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005).
Frequently called the "English Robert De Niro." Early in his career, Day-Lewis recently referred to De Niro as his champion.
Hated being at Sevenoaks School so much that he ran away.
He lived apart from his wife Rebecca Miller while she was directing him in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005). This is in keeping with his habit of being isolated while in character and shooting a film, which is in part the reason he is hesitant to take more film work.
His performance as Bill "The Butcher" Cutting in Gangs of New York (2002) is ranked #53 on Premiere Magazine`s 100 Greatest Performances of All Time (2006).
His performance as Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989) is ranked #11 on Premiere Magazine`s 100 Greatest Performances of All Time (2006).
In The Crucible (1996) Joan Allen plays his wife. In The Boxer (1997) Emily Watson plays his wife. Both have played Reba McLain. Allen played the part in Manhunter (1986), Watson played the part in the remake, Red Dragon (2002).
Shares his birthday with Uma Thurman and comedian Jerry Seinfeld.
Was considered for the role of Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ (2004), but director Mel Gibson thought he looked "too European" and the part instead went to James Caviezel.
While filming Gangs of New York (2002) he rarely got out of character and would talk with a New York accent the whole day and would be sharpening his knives at lunch.
Always quiet and introverted, he said that he was not popular in school and was mocked as an outsider while growing up in England, partially because he was of half-Jewish/half-Irish stock. The upside was that, instead of socializing, he developed a rich fantasy life that later helped him to delve so deeply into his characters.
Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the "100 Sexiest Stars" in film history (#11) (1995).
Chosen by People magazine as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People" in the world (1990).
Chosen by People magazine as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People" in the world (2003).
Describes himself as "a lifelong study of evasion."
He was the first of three consecutive British actors to win the Oscar for Best Actor in a leading role, Jeremy Irons being next and Anthony Hopkins the third. Each of them coincidentally won at their first nomination in the Academy Awards.
Is a skilled woodworker in addition to being able to make his living as a cobbler.
Moving to County Wicklow, Ireland, he assumed Irish citizenship (1993).
Not only do he and Michelle Pfeiffer share a birthday, but both were married on the same day, albeit three years apart.
Ranked #25 in Empire (UK) magazine`s "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list (October 1997).
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