Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel Day-Lewis: an extraordinary career of acting artistry – is it really all over?

The man with the most best actor Oscars has announced his retirement. Let’s hope he changes his mind – screen-acting careers don’t get any more brilliant than 

Peter Bradshaw

Wednesday 21 July 2017

So Daniel Day-Lewis has joined Steven Soderbergh, Ken Loach and Jack Nicholson in the ranks of movie greats who have announced that most unthinkably non-showbusiness move: retirement. At the age of just 60, the legendary triple Oscar winner – recipient of more best actor Oscars than anyone in Academy Award history – says that his next film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s fashion drama Phantom Thread, will be his last. As with those other giants, we have to hope that Sir Daniel will soon feel the need to hand back the carriage clock, hang up the golf clubs and resume his vocation.

Of course, most actors do not have the option to retire. Other actors, such as Sean Connery and Gene Hackman, step back at the end of their careers without clearly announcing the fact. For a while, it was thought that Hugh Grant was semi-retired, but he continues to work – and get great notices. But most actors carry on into extreme old age, because they need the money or because this is what they love to do. They act because they must.

Day-Lewis, however, has long had the luxury of accepting only those jobs that interest him and enjoying a mini-retirement between each role. Now he has the luxury of reading his own professional obituaries, which, unlike the real thing, will be coloured by regretful scepticism, by a feeling that it can’t be over. Well, I believe him. He retired from stage work after an emotional crisis that assailed him in 1989. He had been playing Hamlet at the National Theatre in London when he had a feeling that he had seen the spirit of his late father. He never appeared on stage again. It was not a formal retirement, but it certainly showed his steely personal resolve.

Screen acting careers don’t get any more brilliant than Day-Lewis’s, and looking back at his – and despite that much discussed and giggled at method-acting approach – his roles look like an old-fashioned portrait gallery of meticulously costumed characters, like brilliant theatrical creations by Olivier or Welles. He has always been a superbly accomplished craftsman, and it is telling that before going into acting he applied (albeit unsuccessfully) for an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker and, in the late 90s, apprenticed as a shoemaker under the master cobbler, Stefano Bemer.

Brenda Fricker and Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features

For My Left Foot in 1989, the film that won him his first best actor Oscar, he meticulously re-created the personality of Christy Brown, the writer and painter born with cerebral palsy and only able to move his left foot. It was a characteristically dazzling performance (although 20 years later the same thing might well be accompanied by a dispute over casting a non-disabled actor). His second Oscar was for his stunning lead in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, playing the angry, conflicted and unhappy oil mogul Daniel Plainview. Again, like Olivier, Day-Lewis had triumphantly nailed the voice (though at what point in the process we can’t know). It was a resonant Scots-Irish American, a little like John Huston. The whole form of the character came to vibrant life, and his eyes blazed like coals, incandescent with fear and rage.

And his third Oscar was for playing Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s fine study of the American president’s personal crisis during the US civil war. It was a gaunt, wintry, wounded but determined Lincoln that Day-Lewis created for the screen; a wonderful, humanist leap of imagination, finding a way into a historical figure who is otherwise dauntingly legendary, like something marble or granite. Day-Lewis found a Lincoln of flesh and blood.

But my favourite Day-Lewis roles are not his Lincoln or Christy Brown. I loved the sheer sinuous sexiness and subversion of his gay ex-fascist street-fighter punk Johnny Burfoot in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), scripted by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears. An utterly contrasting role was his prissy, lemon-voiced Cecil Vyse in the Merchant/Ivory adaptation of EM Forster’s A Room With a Viewthat year. It was a cousin to his exquisitely refined Newland Archer in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence in 1993. He brought classical poise and a dancer’s grace to the screen.

Very different was his roistering, monstrous turn in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), part mobster, part circus performer. It was larger than larger than life, and many felt that Day-Lewis had a slight tendency to ham. I loved his mad energy and repeat the response I made at the time: quibbling about it is like objecting to the mis-aligned spangles on the costume of a someone who is juggling double-decker buses.

My least favourite Day-Lewis performance is the one which is most quoted: his Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, resonantly promising: “I will find you!” Of course, it is a terrifically confident, plausible performance, but unlike almost any other Day-Lewis movie it is slightly generic.

He was absolutely superb in Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1991), playing the wrongly convicted Gerry Conlon – and incidentally achieving a wonderful, touching chemistry with the actor who played his father Giuseppe, the much-loved and still much-missed Pete Postlethwaite.

Were there any missteps in his career? Well, perhaps. Rob Marshall’s syrupy romantic musical Nine (2009), broadly based on Fellini’s 8 ½, was hardly an obvious vehicle for Daniel Day-Lewis, who took the Mastroianni role of the troubled film-maker Guido. And yet he showed flashes of Day-Lewis genius. When his character has to call in a doctor because he has got one of the women in his life pregnant, and this doctor contemptuously dresses down Guido for his bad behaviour, Day-Lewis gives the camera a grim but very real and eloquent scowl of humiliation. What an extraordinary career – what a portfolio of artistry. My only regret is that I never got to see his stage Hamlet. Is it really all over?

THE GUARDIAN