John Wallace looks at the careers of Wicklow-based actor, Daniel Day-Lewis and his Irish father, the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis
One of the most dedicated actors of his generation, Daniel Day-Lewis totally immerses himself in his carefully-chosen film roles. He is difficult to satisfy artistically and he continues to confront the rules of Hollywood.
De Niro has made 23 movies in the last ten years. Day-Lewis has made just five.
According to film critic David Thomson, Daniel Day-Lewis is currently seriously expanding his artistic range. The recently-released There Will Be Blood has Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, an ambitious oil baron at the turn of the last century.
He plays a monster, but a ‘human’ monster and Day-Lewis imbues an ostensibly difficult individual with an element of compassion.
h4. There Will Be Blood
This just-released film covers the period 1898-1927. Day-Lewis plays the central character, a cold, self-made businessman. Film critic Michael Dwyer calls the role a “performance of staggering depth”. The first 12 minutes of the film are pure cinema, without dialogue, but with a score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.
The film is based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair, published in 1927. The movie is about greed, fundamentalism and anarchy and was filmed in just two months in Texas. It has earned the Best Actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis and also two Golden Globe nominations.
The film is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who, it has been said, knows everything, except how to get a hit. Anderson is regarded as the most ambitious American film-maker of his generation.
Influenced by veteran director Robert Altman, Anderson looks into the depths of society. It is widely held that Anderson is actually as good as he thinks he is. A cult figure before he was 30, he is very concerned with American society and has worked with Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Burt Reynolds and more recently, Daniel Day-Lewis.
h4. Early career
The career of Daniel Day-Lewis began back in 1971 and he has made some 25 films since then.
He was born in London in 1957. His mum, Jill Balcon, still lives in London. After training at the Bristol Old Vic, Day-Lewis went on to do impressive work in the theatre. With considerable stage experience, he is highly selective in his choice of film roles. He had a small part in the film Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough, in 1982. His breakthrough, however, came in the role of a gay punk in My Beautiful Launderette, directed in 1985 by Stephen Frears.
Aged 33, he won several awards for his role as the disabled writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot, directed by Jim Sheridan in 1989.
Day-Lewis is an Irish citizen and he seized on the role. Interviewed recently by Sophie Dahl for Vogue magazine, he says that Ireland is his “secret garden”. Delivering Brown’s volatility and sexuality to the screen, Day-Lewis inhabited the character and his portrayal of the celebrated Irish artist was both focused and forceful.
h4. Last of the Mohicans
In the broadly commercial The Last of the Mohicans, directed by Michael Mann in 1992, Day-Lewis played Hawkeye, an individual caught between two cultures. This is the most exciting of the three Hollywood versions of the classic adventure yarn. Mann brilliantly captured the essence of the era in North Carolina’s Smokey Mountains and Day-Lewis was in his element in the action drama.
On a personal level, Day-Lewis is famously polite and erudite. He is concerned with technical perfection and admires directors Ken Loach and Lindsay Anderson. On acting, he has said: “If I weren’t allowed this outlet, there wouldn’t be a place for me in society.”
He is immensely courteous and his voice has taken on the soft lilt of his adopted Wicklow. He thinks like a writer and does not like to waste words. “You need to continually reassess what you are doing while you are doing it,” he says.
He is married to actress and director Rebecca Miller, daughter of the late US playwright, Arthur Miller.
Day-Lewis has worked for a time as an apprentice to a Florentine cobbler and he is currently a member of the craftsmen’s union. He likes Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan and he also supports Millwall Football Club (the triumph of optimism over reason).
His father was Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in Ireland in 1904 and died in 1972. He had a complicated relationship with his dad and says of him, “He was an absolute mystery to me.”
h4. Cecil Day-Lewis
A compelling figure, Cecil Day-Lewis was a leading light of English poetry from 1930 to 1970.
Peter Stanford’s new biography tells us that Cecil was born in Ballintubber, County Laois, the only child of Frank Day-Lewis, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland. Aged two years old, Cecil’s family moved to England where his mother died when he was just four.
Cecil would return from England frequently to spend time in Enniscorthy with relatives. This was the happiest time of his childhood. However, the poverty suffered by the miners to which his clergyman father ministered, in Nottinghamshire, had a huge impact on Cecil. It gave him a social conscience and also the left-wing sympathies that stayed with him all his life.
From Sherborne, a public school in Dorset, he went on to study Classics at ‘the ancient and venerable’ Wadham College, Oxford. Here he was friends with poets W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. They were all Oxford-educated, left-wing writers.
Cecil believed that in writing poetry, the poet had a responsibility to a wider society. His poetry went beyond purely personal concerns. This sense of responsibility to the wider world is what distinguishes him as a writer. He had a persistent devotion to public duty. It was unglamorous, but he wrote poetry on political subjects.
He had a complex personal life, where poetic licence extended beyond the linguistic world.
His last important relationship was with the actress and poetry reader Jill Balcon, with whom he lived happily and had two children, including the actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
Cecil published his first poetry in 1925 and in 1944 he wrote the popular Poetry for You. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 until 1956 and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968.
Cecil also wrote 20 quite sophisticated detective novels as ‘Nicholas Blake’. His autobiography, The Buried Day, was published in 1960.
h4. Paramount Pictures
The poet’s son, Daniel Day-Lewis, has an impressive screen presence and is renowned for immersing himself in his roles. While popular at Paramount Pictures, he is publicity shy and has a relatively small body of work. However, he is undoubtedly one of the most versatile and powerful actors to appear in the last 20 years.
As with There will be Blood, he selectively submerges himself in real and socially relevant film roles. His father would certainly have approved.
‘There Will be Blood’ is on general release. ‘Cecil Day-Lewis; a Life’ (2007) by Peter Stanford is published by Continuum.
John Wallace is a medical doctor and a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford.
About Mary Anne Kenny
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