Between his first adult role in 1982 and the release of Phantom Thread, just before his short ‘retirement’ in 2017, Daniel Day-Lewis earned a reputation as one of the best actors of all time. This reputation hinged on his dedication to The Method – extreme dedication to his character. While filming My Left Foot, he played a disabled character and refused to walk on set, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. For Last of the Mohicans, he lived in the forest in Alabama, where he refused to eat anything he hadn’t personally killed, and for Lincoln, he requested that the director, Steven Spielberg, address him as “Mr President.” For this work, Day-Lewis won three Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, and Lincoln, and was nominated for a further three.
Over the course of his career, Day-Lewis has worked with some of the most acclaimed directors in history, including Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, Jim Sheridan, Martin Scorsese and Richard Attenborough. His most widely loved collaboration, however, is with Paul Thomas Anderson, with whom he made Phantom Thread in 2017 and There Will Be Blood in 2007. There Will Be Blood, where he plays oil baron Daniel Plainview, is arguably his most iconic role, and if you watch one Daniel Day-Lewis film, it must be this one. It summarises in one film his best qualities as an actor – the sheer intensity as we watch his character’s descent into immorality.
In my opinion, however, his best roles are found in his collaboration with Irish director Jim Sheridan throughout the 1990s. These include My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, and The Boxer. Day-Lewis himself has Irish ancestry, which motivated him to work on these intimate character stories which all take place in Belfast, the latter two specifically dealing with the IRA and the Irish struggle during the Troubles between 1969 to 1998. In the Name of the Father is my personal favourite. In it, he plays Gerry Conlon, a man falsely imprisoned in connection with an IRA bomb, serving 15 years in prison. Again, for the film, Day-Lewis went the extra mile in his preparation, electing to live in a jail cell, eating only prison rations, and asking the crew of the film to throw water at him as he entered the set. In this film, he demonstrates the different emotions in the fight for justice expertly. Throughout this unofficial Belfast trilogy, he also executes probably the best Northern Irish accent by a non-Northern Irish actor I’ve ever heard. Day-Lewis has made his return this month, eight years after he claimed he would be retiring from acting just before the release of Phantom Thread, with the release of Anemone, which released on 3 October in the United States, and will release in the UK on 7 November. Directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, the film has received praise for Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance, indicating that his talent never truly left in 2017.
“Daniel Day Lewis” by chloe004 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.