Daniel Day-Lewis

Info

Full Name: Daniel Day-Lewis
Date of birth: April 29, 1957 (69 years old)
Location: London
Country: UK

Daniel Day-Lewis has been active for 43 years, participating in 17 movies that average a 7.5/10 score.

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Biography

Three Best Actor Oscars, and just over twenty films in fifty years. That ratio is the whole story of Daniel Day-Lewis. No other performer has won the leading actor award three times, and few have worked less often to get there, disappearing for years at a stretch and coming back only when something was worth the trouble.

He was born in Kensington on 29 April 1957. His father was Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate from 1968, who died when Daniel was fifteen; his mother was the actress Jill Balcon; his grandfather was Sir Michael Balcon, who ran Ealing Studios. His sister Tamasin became a food writer. He was sent to board at Sevenoaks and then Bedales, and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

He started with a few seconds as a street vandal in 'Gandhi' (1982), Richard Attenborough's epic with Ben Kingsley.

What announced him was 1985, when two of his films arrived within months of each other. In Stephen Frears' 'My Beautiful Laundrette' he is a south London skinhead who falls for a Pakistani schoolfriend. In James Ivory's 'A Room With a View' he is Cecil Vyse, a prig in a stiff collar, opposite Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith. Seeing them back to back made the point better than any interview could. Three years later he learned Czech and stayed in character throughout 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'.

The night he walked off

The stage came first, at the Royal Shakespeare Company and then the National, and it ended abruptly. In September 1989, part way through Richard Eyre's uncut 'Hamlet' at the Olivier, he broke down during the scene in which the prince meets his father's ghost, stopped, and left. Seven performances remained and his understudy finished the run.

A story went round for years that he had seen his own dead father standing in the wings. He has spent much of the time since playing it down. Whatever happened, he has never appeared on a stage again.

Total immersion

Later that year came 'My Left Foot', Jim Sheridan's film about the Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy and worked with his left foot. Day-Lewis spent weeks at a Dublin clinic, stayed in the wheelchair between takes and had the crew feed him. It won him his first Oscar.

The reputation for obsessive preparation dates from there, and it is mostly deserved. For Michael Mann's 'The Last of the Mohicans' (1992) he learned to track, hunt and build canoes. For Martin Scorsese's 'The Age of Innocence' (1993) he walked around New York in 1870s tailoring for two months, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder.

The hardest of them arrived the same year. 'In the Name of the Father' cast him as Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, jailed for bombings they had nothing to do with. He lost two stone, shut himself in a cell, ate prison food and asked real detectives to interrogate him through the night. It brought an Oscar nomination, with Pete Postlethwaite and Emma Thompson alongside him.

Then 'The Crucible' (1996), from Arthur Miller's Salem play, and 'The Boxer' (1997), for which he trained for three years with the former world champion Barry McGuigan. He finished with a broken nose and a damaged disc, and McGuigan said he could have turned professional.

Shoemaking in Florence

After that he stopped. He moved to Florence and apprenticed himself to the shoemaker Stefano Bemer, learning lasts and stitching. Five years went by between releases, with very little sign of him.

Scorsese brought him back for 'Gangs of New York' (2002) as Bill the Butcher, the nativist boss of the Five Points, against Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz. He hired circus performers to teach him knife throwing, held the accent between takes and, when he caught pneumonia shooting through a Roman winter, refused a coat that was not period.

Five years later Paul Thomas Anderson gave him Daniel Plainview in 'There Will Be Blood' (2007), an oil prospector eaten by his own greed, with Paul Dano opposite him. That was Oscar number two. Collecting the SAG award, he dedicated it to Heath Ledger, who had died five days earlier. In between he had made 'The Ballad of Jack and Rose' (2005) for his wife, Rebecca Miller. He followed the Oscar by playing an Italian film director in the musical 'Nine' (2009) for Rob Marshall, surrounded by Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman and Judi Dench.

Lincoln, and then nothing

Steven Spielberg spent a year talking him into 'Lincoln' (2012). He read more than a hundred books, decided the president's voice was far higher than anyone expects, and kept it up for the whole shoot, off set included. Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones filled out the cast, and the third Oscar followed in February 2013. He was knighted the year after.

The last job before the silence was 'Phantom Thread' (2017), Anderson again, with him as a 1950s London couturier who cannot live with anybody, opposite Vicky Krieps and Lesley Manville. He learned to cut and sew properly before shooting. In June that year, months ahead of release, his representative put out two lines: he would no longer be working as an actor, the decision was private, and there would be no further comment.

Back, eight years on

The return, in 2025, was a family job. 'Anemone' is the first film by his son Ronan Day-Lewis, who directs and shares the screenplay credit with his father. It is a story about brothers, fathers and sons, with Sean Bean, Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomley. It premiered at the New York Film Festival in September 2025 and reached British cinemas that November. Reviews divided, with the screenplay taking most of the criticism and his performance almost none.

He has since talked the retirement down considerably, saying he never really meant to stop, that putting it in those terms was grandiose nonsense, and that although he had felt hollowed out he never stopped loving the work.

He gives away as little as he can about the rest. He has a son, Gabriel-Kane, born in 1995, with the actress Isabelle Adjani. In November 1996 he married the director Rebecca Miller, Arthur Miller's daughter, whom he had met on 'The Crucible'; they have two sons, Ronan and Cashel.

He splits his time between New York and County Wicklow, has held Irish citizenship since 1993, and supports Millwall, which is possibly the least glamorous fact available about a man who has spent forty years avoiding anything resembling a normal career.