by For a long period of time, probably between around 2002 and 2012, it was fairly universally accepted that Daniel Day-Lewis was the finest actor in the world.
He had just landed his third ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, making him the only actor in all of Academy Awards history to do so. And he’d won that award in three different decades.
You might think that would mean Day-Lewis would be highly in demand (he was) and would be taking on several more projects (he didn’t) because he is, without doubt, a complicated soul, touched by the contradictions that genius brings to those who are genuinely on a completely different level to anyone else.
As an example, in 1989, the same year he won his first Oscar for My Left Foot, Day-Lewis was playing Hamlet at the National Theatre when, during the scene in which the titular character’s father’s ghost appears, he broke down, left the stage and never acted in the theatre again. And between 1997 and 2000, he completely turned his back on Hollywood and acting in general and simply decamped to Italy in order to become a shoemaker.
He is not someone who follows conventional paths, then, it is fair to say, and it has been eight years since he was last seen in a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. But now he is back, in no small part thanks to his son Ronan, with whom he has co-written the film Anemone, also starring Sean Bean and directed by the younger Day-Lewis.
Day-Lewis told Martin Scorsese about the reasoning behind his comeback, saying, “From when he was the youngest age, we made stuff together, and it was a continuation of that spirit. Having decided to take that time away from movies, I knew that Ronan was going on to make films, and certainly, there was a sadness in me that I would then not have that chance to work with him.”
So it is really his son we have to doff a cap to for the chance to see Day-Lewis on the big screen again, the latest twist in the tale of an actor who seems to almost dip in and out of a vocation he was undoubtedly born to do. He has now had three or four retirements of sorts, most famously after being Oscar-nominated for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, that hiatus lasting five years before he came back to go one better, winning the award for 2007’s oil epic, There Will Be Blood.
Day-Lewis recently told the New York Times about his love-hate relationship with his craft, revealing that at a young age, after being accepted to the National Youth Theatre, he was so aware of warnings about the ‘sleaze and corruption’ of a professional actor’s lifestyle, he considered being a furniture maker instead.
He explained: “I had two cabinetmaking teachers (at age 15), both superb, and the younger one was closer to my age. I announced to him that I was going to get an apprenticeship as a furniture maker just up the road from my boarding school. He said, ‘You don’t have the temperament for it.’ He knew I was a little savage. I wanted to be like them, but I wasn’t like them.”
Thankfully for movie fans, Day-Lewis instead followed through with acting, working his way from the stage to television to the film that made his name, My Left Foot, the story of a young Irish man suffering from cerebral palsy who became an artist despite only being able to move his foot. Almost 40 years later, he has cemented his position as one of the greatest actors in history.
