Biography of Daniel Day-Lewis :- British actor nationalized Irish, considered by the specialized critic one of the most complete of its generation.
Very meticulous and a perfectionist, very selective in choosing roles and jealous of their privacy against the media spotlight, has won three times the Oscar for best actor for his performances in My Left Foot (1990), There Will Be Blood ( 2008) and Lincoln (2012).
Biography of Daniel Day-Lewis
- Born:- 29 April 1957 (age 60), Greenwich, United Kingdom
- Height:- 1.87 m
- Awards:- Academy Award for Best Actor,
Predestined to success, this Taurus convinced of his talent and declared enemy of the pink press had by father to Cecil Day-Lewis , well – known English poet. At birth, his father gave him a few premonition verses: “What a little piece of man I’ve had, / what a power he has, / but without strength yet and naked like a walnut without a shell!”
See Also: Biography of Javier Bardem
Jill Balcon, her mother, was a theater actress, and her father, Sir Michael Balcon, a reputed film producer. Progressive, educated and conscientious, Cecil and Jill enrolled their son in a public school in London.
As Daniel tended to get along with bad boys, they soon chose to vary their pedagogical course and sent him to a boarding school in Kent.
At the age of only fourteen the future actor appeared fleetingly in his first film, Sunday, Damn Sunday (a forgotten but inspired drama of John Schlesinger), giving life to a hooligan of those he knew so well.
After this stage baptism, he changed again from boarding school, although in this case it was a much more open school, where he perfected his interpretive skills and discovered what would eventually be one of his great hobbies, carpentry.
Fouled at the Old Vic Theater School in Bristol, where he studied for a few years, he managed to earn his living with occasional appearances in television productions that alternated with performances in the theater.
In 1982 he played a very secondary role in the monumental biopic entitled Gandhi , and was credited for the first time with his stage name. Two years later, in The Bounty , an adaptation of the naval classic, it could already be seen in a role of a certain substance.
But it was undoubtedly in My Beautiful Laundry (the film that in 1985 gave international fame to its director, Stephen Frears) where at last they could intuit the potentialities of Daniel.
Frears, at that time an independent and full of ideas, specialized in telling urban histories of losers of Thatcherian England, was able to motivate to the maximum to a Lewis that began to feed his fame of actor very perfectionist, needed to study his personages with Minuteness in the pathological. This feature was related to one of the actors most admired by the London interpreter: Robert de Niro.
However, it would not be until 1989 when his final consecration would arrive when interpreting the paper of a disabled person who had managed to use his left foot to paint pictures.
The film, entitled My Left Foot , was the first of its collaborations with director Jim Sheridan and provided him with the Oscar for best actor and best actor award at the London Critics Circle Film, as well as the award for Best Actor in BAFTA and the same distinction by the National Society of Film Critics.
Lewis spent months and months living with the disabled, and during the filming did not move from the wheelchair to fully enter the role. That same year began a sentimental relation with the French actress Isabelle Adjani, with which would have a son, Gabriel-Kane.
In that same period he began to gain the reputation of extremely selective actor in the election of his papers. He declined to work on big-ticket titles like Philadelphia or Interview with the Vampire , decisions that benefited, respectively, Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise .
He also received excellent reviews for his Hamlet on the boards of the National Theater, a marathon collaboration he left exhausted after a long list of performances.
Another work that required a process of prior adaptation was The Last Mohican (1992, M. Mann). An intense physical preparation allowed him to increase his muscle mass by 10 kilos.
He also learned how to shoot, to sail in a canoe, and to skin animals to portray the character of his character. The film was its biggest commercial success to date.
In 1993 he repeated with Jim Sheridan in the drama In the Name of the Father , which chronicled the actual case of a father and son unjustly imprisoned for alleged membership in the IRA.
It is curious that the same year Lewis adopted Irish citizenship and acquired in the Republic of Ireland a beautiful rural village called Castlekevin.
It was an intense year in his career, as he also filmed Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence , an excellent performance that probably went unnoticed (unfairly) by its closeness in time to that of Gerry Conlon in Sheridan’s film.
In 1994 there was a very unusual event in the actor’s biography: for the first time and perhaps only once, Lewis attempted to take over a role … and was rejected. It was the role of Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction , for which Quentin Tarantino preferred, as is well known, John Travolta. From then on his appearances on the screen were much rarer.
When she finished with Isabelle Adjani, several rumors related to Julia Roberts , among other well-known Hollywood celebrities, but with her marriage on November 13, 1996 with Rebecca Miller, daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller, came up with this information.
In 2002 (after having filmed only two films in eight years, the Obvious The Salem Witches and The Boxer ) participated in what is by far his worst film to date, the pretentious and failed Gangs of New York , from Martin Scorsese.
Faithful to the perfectionism that characterizes him, to give credibility to the character learned the trade of butcher and the art of throwing knives. He went even further when, having fallen ill in Italy shortly before he began filming, he rejected the antibiotics offered by the doctor on the grounds that “at the time when the film was set, such drugs did not exist.”
This effort in folly did not save the limitations of one of the most pitiful scripts in the history of modern cinema. Probably this was the only misstep of his entire career, especially considering that he may have been the Aragorn of the Lord of the Rings trilogy ; But rejected the offer of director Peter Jackson , who initially preferred him to Viggo Mortensen .
Directed by his own wife, Lewis shot in 2005 The Ballad of Jack & Rose , a film that would not go down in history and that made him fear for the future of one of the most charismatic actors of his generation.
Fortunately, these fears were disbanded with Wells of Ambition , an epic film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, chronicling the story of Daniel Plainview, a miserable miner turned oil tycoon.
Role-sized for the Londoner, the character would allow him to get his second Oscar for best lead actor. This triumph was again followed by a failed film, Nine (2009), adaptation to the celluloid of a musical inspired in turn in Fellini eight and a half (1963), in which Day-Lewis.
The revenge came from the hand of Steven Spielberg, who offered to star in a lavish historical production focused on the last months of the president’s term that abolished slavery: Lincoln (2012). Preceded by a considerable success at the box office and with the majority applause of the critics, despite some pomp, the film received twelve nominations and left as the great favorite at the ceremony of the Oscars.
The Academy recognized only the excellent setting, giving a statuette to the best artistic direction, and, by giving Day-Lewis its third Oscar, it seemed to be unanimous that its portentous interpretation of Lincoln, meticulously prepared as all his own, was The pillar that held the film. Daniel and his wife Rebecca had two children, Ronan and Cashel-Blake.
