Daniel Day-Lewis

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Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis (born 29 April 1957) is a retired English actor.One of the most respected actors of his generation, he has also been hailed as one of the greatest actors in cinema history. He has received numerous awards throughout his career, including three Academy Awards for Best Actor, making him the only male actor to have three wins in the Best Actor category and one of only three male actors to win three Oscars.[6] He won four BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. In June 2014, he 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. Displaying a "mercurial intensity", he would often remain completely in character throughout the shooting schedules of his films, even to the point of adversely affecting his health. He is one of the most selective actors in the film industry, having starred in only six films since 1998, with as many as five years between roles] Protective of his private life, he rarely gives 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 in Romeo and Juliet and Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream, before appearing in the 1984 film The Bounty. He starred in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), his first critically acclaimed role, and gained further public notice with A Room with a View (1985). He then assumed leading man status with The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). His performance in My Left Foot (1989) saw him receive his first Academy Award and BAFTA for Best Actor. Following his performance in The Boxer (1997), Day-Lewis retired from acting for three years, taking up a new profession as an apprentice shoe-maker in Italy. He returned to acting in 2000 to film Gangs of New York (2002). He won Oscars and BAFTAs again for There Will Be Blood (2007) and Lincoln (2012). He was also nominated for the Academy Award for his work in In the Name of the Father (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), and Phantom Thread (2017). Day-Lewis announced his retirement in 2017, following the completion of Phantom Threa

Protective of his privacy, Day-Lewis described his life as a "lifelong study in evasion".[67] He had a relationship with French actress Isabelle Adjani that lasted six years, eventually ending after a split and reconciliation.[8] Their son, Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis, was born on 9 April 1995, in New York City, a few months after the relationship ended.

In 1996, while working on the film version of the stage play The Crucible, he visited the home of playwright Arthur Miller, where he was introduced to the writer's daughter, Rebecca Miller.[8] They married later that year, on 13 November 1996. The couple have two sons, Ronan Cal Day-Lewis (born 1998) and Cashel Blake Day-Lewis (born 2002). They divide their time between their homes in Annamoe, County Wicklow and Manhattan, New York.

Day-Lewis has held dual British and Irish citizenship since 1993.[70] He has maintained his Annamoe home since 1997. He stated: "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." He is a supporter of South East London football club Millwall.[73] Day-Lewis is also an Ambassador for The Lir Academy, a new drama school at Trinity College Dublin, founded in 2011.

On 15 July 2010, Day-Lewis received an honorary doctorate in letters from the University of Bristol, in part because of his attendance of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in his youth. Day-Lewis has stated that he had "no real religious education", and that he "suppose[s]" he is "a die-hard agnostic". In October 2012, he donated to the University of Oxford papers belonging to his father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, including early drafts of the poet's work and letters from actor John Gielgud and literary figures such as W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, and Philip Larkin. In July 2015, he became the Honorary President of the Poetry Archive. A registered UK charity, the Poetry Archive is a free website containing a growing collection of recordings of English-language poets reading their work.[78] In June 2017, Day-Lewis became a patron of the Wilfred Owen Association. Day-Lewis' association with Wilfred Owen began with his father, Cecil Day-Lewis, who edited Owen's poetry in the 1960s and his mother, Jill Balcon, who was a vice-president of the Wilfred Owen Association until her death in 2009.

In 2008, when he received the Academy Award for Best Actor from Helen Mirren (who was on presenting duty having won the previous year's Best Actress Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen), Day-Lewis knelt before her, and she tapped him on each shoulder with the Oscar statuette, to which he quipped: "That's the closest I'll come to ever getting a knighthood."[82] Day-Lewis was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to drama. On 14 November 2014, he was knighted by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, in an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

The VERY strange life of reclusive superstar Daniel Day-Lewis

By PAUL SCOTT

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-509161/The-VERY-strange-life-reclusive-superstar-Daniel-Day-Lewis.html

As the lift doors slide open in the vast and suitably grand lobby of a Beverly Hills hotel, a tall, shambling figure steps incongruously into a Mêlée of designer-suited Hollywood dealmakers.

Head down and wearing a tatty fisherman's cap and black biker's T-shirt, which exposes a tangle of vivid blue tattoos down one arm, he also sports two silver hoop earrings which give him the (slightly comical) appearance of a pantomime pirate.

He cuts a somewhat unlikely figure in these ornate and distinctly moneyed environs, and merits barely a flicker of recognition from those around him as he edges his way through the power-dressed throng to the hotel bar.

There, in a lilting Irish accent, he orders a pint of Guinness, which he drinks alone on a barstool while studiously avoiding eye contact with his well-heeled fellow guests.

This is Daniel Day-Lewis, who was this week being hailed as the greatest actor on the planet.

Here, he is in his more customary role, as Hollywood's most reluctant - and increasingly strange - star.

For the past ten years, the London-born actor has led a resolutely reclusive existence, locked away on a remote 50-acre estate in the mountains of County Wicklow (hence the former public schoolboy's recently acquired Irish brogue).

He has emerged to make just four films in the past decade, including his latest role as a violent oil prospector in There Will Be Blood, which won him a Golden Globe this week (hence this rare appearance in Los Angeles), has been nominated for a Bafta, and is tipped to earn him a second Best Actor Oscar.

Indeed, the film critic of the New York Times called the actor's latest chilling performance the greatest he had seen.

But the win comes as rumours circulate in Hollywood that one co-star quit the movie in disgust after branding Day-Lewis "crazy and intimidating".

Another claimed this week that in one fight scene in a bowling alley, the star pummelled him for real with bowling balls.

Paul Dano, who starred opposite Day-Lewis in the turn-of-the-century drama, said: "They start flying and I realise he's getting into it. Then a ball bounces up and hits me in the leg, and I'm thinking: 'OK, those are heavy; this is getting serious - I'd better duck.'"

there will be blood

All of which is being lapped up by gossiping movie executives over corporate lunches at Hollywood's trendiest watering holes, as are tales from the few who have been permitted admittance to the star's isolated Irish hideaway.

Visitors to his home - which can be reached only via a narrow track - have revealed how he spends his time obsessively practising his twin hobbies of shoe-making and woodwork, as well as riding for hours at a time alone through the mountains on his push bike.

No wonder he is being compared to the equally strange and reclusive Marlon Brando.

But then those who know the 50-year-old Day-Lewis well have long since ceased to be surprised by his eccentric lifestyle.

This spring, he will return to a movie studio - only this time, instead of acting, he will join the carpentry crew, building the sets on The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee, which is to be directed by his wife Rebecca Miller, author of the book on which the film is based.

So obsessed is Day-Lewis with practising his new skills as a carpenter that he admitted, in a rare interview this week, that his nine-year-old son Ronan (the couple also have another boy, five-year-old Cashel) thought, until recently, that his father was not an actor but worked on a building site.

At the same time, the actor is said to insist on living the role of his latest characters for up to two years before beginning a new movie.

For the part of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, he refused to speak to his co-stars off the set, and insisted on living in a tent on a deserted Texas oilfield when the cameras stopped rolling.

In his previous movie, The Ballad Of Jack And Rose, in which he played a reclusive hippy, he built his own shack on the beach of a remote Canadian island, where he would spend the nights after shooting had finished, while his family stayed in a nearby hotel.

Such attention to detail has sometimes irked his co-stars. When he starred as the psychotic Bill "The Butcher" in Martin Scorsese's The Gangs Of New York, he first trained as a butcher; and while on set, he listened obsessively to the music of foul-mouthed rapper Eminem in a bid to keep up his "level of aggression".

It resulted in him falling out with co-star Liam Neeson, who was furious that Day-Lewis insisted on addressing him by his character's name even when they met in the gym at their hotel.

On the same film, he also refused to acknowledge Leonardo DiCaprio, who broke Day-Lewis's nose in one all-too-realistic fight scene.

Taking method acting to the extreme is very much a Day-Lewis hallmark.

In the role that won him his first Oscar, his acclaimed 1989 performance as Irish writer and cerebral palsy victim Christy Moore in My Left Foot, he asked the crew to wheel him around in his wheelchair between takes and feed him with a spoon.

To prepare for his part as the wrongly convicted alleged IRA bomber Gerry Conlon in the film about the Guildford Four, In The Name Of The Father, he spent three nights on meagre prison rations in a freezing cold cell.

Those passing by on the set were instructed to abuse him and throw cold water on him.

One technician, who has twice worked with Day-Lewis, said this week: "I have never known anything like it.

"We all had to call him by his character's name, even if we bumped into him in the toilets.

"If he was doing a scene where he was being aggressive or having a fight, he would start getting really angry a few days beforehand, and would be glaring and snarling at people on the set.

"You had to know when to steer well clear of him because he could be pretty terrifying when he was in character.

"I must say, I personally gave him a wide berth because I thought he was nuts.

"But I met him socially shortly after doing the first picture with him and he was utterly charming and as nice as pie to me.

"It was as if, during filming, he actually became the person he was playing."

Day-Lewis has in the past been dogged by rumours of drug-taking, although this week he said he had stopped using them.

He does admit, however, that a year after his father's death (he is the son of former poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who died when Daniel was 15), he took an overdose of migraine tablets and received psychiatric treatment.

It had not been an easy childhood: his father had sent him to board at Sevenoaks School in Kent in a bid to cure his "unruliness", which included shoplifting and fighting.

But Cecil's death left a lasting wound.

Later, when his agent Julian Belfrage, who had become a surrogate father to him, died of cancer in 1994, Daniel is said to have suffered a nervous breakdown.

Five years earlier, he had a similar mental collapse while playing Hamlet on stage in the West End.

The actor became convinced he was talking to the ghost of his dead father and ran from the stage, sobbing uncontrollably.

He has never returned to the theatre since.

But his brooding intensity has been catnip to a series of Hollywood beauties, including Julia Roberts, Winona Ryder, Greta Scacchi and Juliette Binoche.

He has a 12-year-old son, Gabriel Kane, from his six-year, on-off relationship with French actress Isabelle Adjani.

She later revealed he had dumped her by fax when he discovered she was pregnant with Gabriel and initially made no payments for the child. (Friends say he is now close to his son.)

He was also accused of a certain ruthlessness when he met Miss Miller, now 45, in 1996 on the set of The Crucible - a film of the play written by her father, the acclaimed American playwright Arthur Miller.

After a whirlwind romance, the couple were married secretly in Vermont.

There was just one hitch: the actor had neglected to tell his long-time girlfriend of the time, fitness instructor Deya Pichardo, who was still living in his Manhattan apartment.

Deya only discovered he had got married when a friend of his rang to congratulate her, assuming that she was the new bride.

Day-Lewis's uncle, Jonathan Balcon, branded his nephew "a bounder" whose morals were "up the spout".

But his relationship with Miss Miller has been mercifully free from scandal.

The actor and his American-born wife keep a holiday home in Connecticut, where her father - the former husband of Marilyn Monroe - retired before his death in 2005.

(The couple and their children moved in with him shortly before he died.)

Three months ago, it was revealed that Day-Lewis had persuaded the elderly Arthur Miller to agree to a reunion with the 40-year-old Down's syndrome son he had put into a home a week after the boy's birth.

Miller had kept the existence of the child, also called Daniel, a secret; but friends say Day-Lewis took to paying weekly visits to see the playwright's secret son.

These days, though, the actor's stays in America have become rare.

Instead, he has increasingly embraced a hermit-style existence in his tiny Irish village.

(Day-Lewis is said to steer clear of other well-off residents, including U2 singer Bono.)

After buying his estate in 1993 for £500,000, he subsequently bought another 45 acres of surrounding countryside to preserve his privacy.

There he spends his days practising his skills as a cobbler in a small workshop.

Locals say they occasionally see him riding around the mountain roads on his racing bicycle, or arriving at his local pub, The Roundwood Inn, on one of his collection of motorbikes.

One fellow drinker said: "He'll come in a couple of times a week and just sit alone at the bar with a pint of Guinness.

"He's always very pleasant and will pass the time of day, but he likes to be pretty much left alone.

"To be honest, I don't think too many of the locals actually realise who he is because he keeps such a low profile.

"He seems embarrassed when he is recognised and obviously has a bit of a problem with fame. Most people understand that and leave him in peace."

One associate said: "Daniel is already fretting about having to go to the Oscars. He hates all the razzmatazz and standing around on the red carpet.

"He can't stand the attention."

This very genuine humility, combined with utter devotion to his craft, has earned this brilliantly gifted actor many admirers.

The irony is that as long as his intense and unusual preparation continues to result in cinematic gold, fame is something Day-Lewis will just have to endure.