Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis (born 29 April 1957) is an English/Irish three-time
Academy Award-winner and legendarily intense method actor. He has starred in such acclaimed films as
My Left Foot,
Age Of Innocence,
The Last of the Mohicans,
In The Name Of The Father,
Gangs Of New York,
There Will Be Blood, and
Abraham Lincoln in
Steven Spielberg's
long-gestating biopic
Lincolnnote His Oscar win for this role made him the first man to win the Best Actor Oscar three times.
His father was British Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. He's married to
Arthur Miller's daughter Rebecca Miller, an accomplished writer in her own right, who he met while filming
The Crucible.
This actor provided examples of:- Badass Moustache: Two of the most iconic as Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Let's be honest, he'd have been committed to an asylum long ago if he wasn't such a brilliant actor.
- Call to Agriculture/Cincinnatus: After learning to make his own clothes in preparation for one film, he left film for six years to become a cobbler in Florence.
- Chewing the Scenery: When the time calls for him to yell, he will YELL.
- Death Glare: Check out the absolute crackers he gives to his nurse/ future wife when she tries to take his hidden bottle of whiskey off him in My Left Foot, to Eli Sunday during his "confirmation" in There Will Be Blood, and at several points during Gangs of New York.
- Doing It for the Art: As has been mentioned, Day-Lewis is one of the most well known method actors around, to the point where he's actually achieved a memetic status as the go to for insane dedication to acting, as during the filming process, he never gets out of character. While playing Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, he famously refused to seek medical treatment for pneumonia until it became almost life threatening, as it was not in keeping with available medical treatment in the 1860's. He also ad libbed tapping on his glass eye with a knife to intimidate William Tweed. When playing a villain, he will accost other actors in character on and off the set, and get into fights in bars in preparation for a role. When playing any character, he will spend six months mastering an accent,note Even if it's completely unnecessary—the most extreme example being when he learned Czech to play the lead in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being despite the fact that the film was shot in English learning various crafts, and adopting disabilities.
- Dyeing For Your Art: Trained as a boxer for three years and broke a knuckle for his role in The Boxer.
- Fake American: Several roles, such as Bill the Butcher, Daniel Plainview and Abraham Lincoln.
- Large Ham: See Chewing the Scenery for more details.
- Mean Character Nice Actor: He's far more polite, friendly and overall normal than many of his characters.
- At first glance, it's quite hard to believe that this mild mannered, kind, and humorous man played characters as disturbed as Bill the Butcher or Daniel Plainview.
- Method Acting: To say the least.
- Nice Jewish Boy: Though by his own admission he's an agnostic.
- Parental Abandonment: His father died when he was fourteen.
- Playing Against Type: He doesn't exactly have a type, per se, but he first drew attention in America for playing two incredibly different roles in movies that happened to premiere in the US on the same day: as the repressed, snobbish, upper-class, Edwardian-era Englishman Cecil in A Room With A View; and Johnny, the gay ex-skinhead thug in Thatcher's London engaged in a forbidden romance with a Pakistani boy, in My Beautiful Laundrette. Many critics were impressed that he did both roles so convincingly.
- Serious Business: Notoriously takes acting very seriously. Luckily he's very good at it.
- What Could Have Been: He actively campaigned for the part of Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, but was turned down by Quentin Tarantino.
- He was also going to be cast as Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings films when Townshend was kicked off the project before Jackson ended up going with Viggo Mortensen. Had Mortensen actually drowned in The Two Towers film, he might've been Mortensen's replacement.
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