Daniel Day-Lewis(1957–)

Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis was born at Greenwich Hospital in south-east London on 29 April 1957, second child of Cecil Day-Lewis, then a Hogarth Press editor and three years off the Poet Laureateship, and the actress Jill Balcon (daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, head of production at Ealing Studios through the studio's post-war heyday). The family was already a literary household. Cecil had been a leading Auden-circle poet of the 1930s, had served on the wartime Ministry of Information staff, and had been a Communist Party member through the 1930s before drifting back to a kind of Anglican-liberal post-war establishment. The young Daniel was schooled at the progressive Sevenoaks School and then at Bedales in Hampshire, where he developed a stutter that he carried into adulthood and that the early acting work taught him how to lose on the stage. He went to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1975 and spent the next four years working in classical rep theatre at Bristol and the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford.

The film career started in earnest at twenty-seven. He played the cockney-skinhead lover Johnny in Stephen Frears's *My Beautiful Laundrette* (1985) and at the same time the buttoned-up Edwardian Cecil Vyse in James Ivory's *A Room with a View* (1985). The two films were released within months of each other and showed two performances at almost opposite ends of British class register from the same actor at the same age, which made critics on both sides of the Atlantic decide that he was the next generation's most technically reachable English-language film actor. Jim Sheridan cast him as the cerebral-palsy-bound Irish writer Christy Brown in *My Left Foot* (1989); he won his first Academy Award for Best Actor. He was thirty-one. The Academy ceremony was the one at which the speech ran *I want to thank my mother* and stopped there. He took Irish citizenship that year on the basis of his half-Irish ancestry through Jill Balcon and the household connection to Sheridan's Dublin circle.

The 1990s were the establishment of the pattern that the rest of the career would run on. He did two or three years between films. The films he chose were long-rehearsal, character-immersion productions in the late-Stanislavski tradition that the press eventually labelled *method* though he never used the word himself: *The Last of the Mohicans* (1992, lived in the Carolina backwoods through the four-month shoot eating only what he could shoot or trap), *In the Name of the Father* (1993, the Guildford Four miscarriage-of-justice story, immersed in the Maze Prison sequences alongside the actual former Guildford Four prisoner Gerry Conlon), *The Age of Innocence* (1993, four-month wardrobe-and-deportment immersion in the Wharton 1870s New York under Scorsese), and *The Crucible* (1996). He married Rebecca Miller, daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller, in 1996; they raised three sons and lived between Wicklow, Ireland and a small farm in upstate New York.

The second Academy Award came in 2007 for the lead in Paul Thomas Anderson's *There Will Be Blood*, the California oil-rush adaptation of the Upton Sinclair novel; the third in 2012 for Steven Spielberg's *Lincoln*, the role for which he had taught himself the Kentucky-frontier-Whig speech-cadence of the historical Lincoln from the few transcribed contemporary descriptions of how he had sounded. He was the first actor in the history of the awards to win the Best Actor category three times. The acceptance speech for *Lincoln* was the one in which he stood at the lectern and noted, by way of opening, that *I really don't know how any of this happened, but I do know that I've received more than my fair share of good fortune in my life*. Between *Lincoln* (2012) and the next film he made the cobbler-apprenticeship at the workshop of Stefano Bemer in Florence which the press eventually picked up on as the period during which he was living as a shoemaker.

Paul Thomas Anderson's *Phantom Thread* (2017), in which he played the haute-couture London dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, was the film he came back from the workshop to make. He announced his retirement from acting before it was released, gave one interview about the decision (to W magazine) and has held to it since. He took Irish citizenship in 1993; he was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours of 2014 by the British Crown and accepted it on the explicit footing that his Irish citizenship was unaffected. He is the second oldest holder of the three-Best-Actor record (he was fifty-five at the *Lincoln* win) and remains, in mid-2026, the only triple Best Actor winner in the history of the Academy Awards. The Day name in its English-side catalogue is the triple-etymology surname of David, daye (the dairy-servant) and the cheerful-as-noon byname; he carries it from the literary-political household of the post-war English Poet Laureate into the foundation of late-twentieth-century English-language screen acting.