Daniel Day-Lewis(1957–)

Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis was born at Greenwich in south-east London on 29 April 1957, son of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, three years off the Poet Laureateship, and the actress Jill Balcon, daughter of the Ealing Studios head of production Sir Michael Balcon. He trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 1975 and spent four years in classical repertory and at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The film career arrived at twenty-seven, with two performances released within months of each other at opposite ends of the British class register: the cockney lover Johnny in Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and the buttoned-up Cecil Vyse in James Ivory's A Room with a View (1985). Critics on both sides of the Atlantic marked him as his generation's most technically complete English-language film actor. Jim Sheridan cast him as the writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989); he won his first Academy Award for Best Actor at thirty-one, and took Irish citizenship through his mother's ancestry.

The 1990s set the pattern the rest of the career ran on: two or three years between films, each a long-rehearsal, total-immersion production. He lived in the Carolina backwoods for The Last of the Mohicans (1992), worked alongside the former Guildford Four prisoner Gerry Conlon for In the Name of the Father (1993), and immersed himself in 1870s New York for Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993). He married Rebecca Miller in 1996 and raised three sons between Ireland and upstate New York.

The second Academy Award came in 2007 for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, the third in 2012 for Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, for which he reconstructed the historical Lincoln's frontier speech-cadence from contemporary descriptions. He became the first and only actor in the history of the awards to win Best Actor three times. Between Lincoln and his next film he apprenticed as a shoemaker at the workshop of Stefano Bemer in Florence.

He returned for Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017), playing a London couturier, and announced his retirement from acting before its release; he has held to it since. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 2014. He remains the only triple Best Actor winner in the history of the Academy Awards. The Day name, the triple-rooted surname of David, the dairy-servant daye and the cheerful byname, carries him from the household of the post-war English Poet Laureate into the foundation of late-twentieth-century English-language screen acting.