The story goes that when Daniel Day-Lewis , who announced his retirement from acting last week, was preparing for the role of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln , he started living in character long before the first day on set. He sent messages to his co-star Sally Field, who played his wife Mary Todd in the film, signing off with ‘Yours A’. As Jessica Winter wrote in Time magazine, in 2012, Day-Lewis changed his sonorous voice to a “gentle tenor, reedy and slightly cracked... Plenty of performers can change their accent, posture or waistline to suit the part. Day-Lewis alone seems capable of remoulding his larynx and vocal chords.” The part earned him his third Best Actor Oscar, the most any male actor has ever won. This relentless pursuit of character has marked every role he has played.
Giving everything to the craft
His father, poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was editorial director at publishing house Chatto & Windus, wrote a poem, Newborn, to announce his birth: “We time-worn folk renew/Ourselves at your enchanted spring,/As though mankind’s begun/Again in you./”
For Day-Lewis, every part he acted seemed to give the craft an “enchanted spring”. His turn as Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, an artist with cerebral palsy who could only move his left foot, earned him his first Oscar in 1989. Day-Lewis has been famously difficult to pursue for a role, but once he was convinced, there was no stopping him. Remember the first scene in My Left Foot ? Christy takes out a record from its cover, puts it on the turntable, then picks up the needle and puts it down again, all with the left foot. It took him many weeks to perfect that, and hours spent with cerebral palsy patients. For the entire duration of the shoot of this Jim Sheridan film, he stayed on a wheelchair. Much like Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman , where, playing a blind man, he refused to blink when he fell down in a thorny bush, and was injured.
American characters
Day-Lewis has played many American characters, directed by the best American directors — from Martin Scorsese (Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence and Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, for which he learnt to throw knives sometimes between takes) to Michael Mann (Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans ) and Spielberg.
He bagged his second Oscar for Paul Thomas Anderson’s historical drama There Will be Blood (2007) and his last appearance will be in the director’s next, Phantom Thread , which is based on the fashion world of 1950s London and will release this Christmas. The actor, who quit the stage in 1989, mid-performance while playing Hamlet, has taken time-outs after every film — including by being a shoemaking apprentice in Italy in the late 90s. So may we hope against hope that there isn’t a sense of finality in his agent’s statement when she says: “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor?”
