"My brother Daniel Day-Lewis won't talk to me any more"

They share the same father, but haven’t spoken in 19 years. Sean Day-Lewis, 81, the older brother of Daniel Day-Lewis has told 'The Daily Telegraph' that Daniel fell out with him after he helped a biographer working on a book about the Oscar-winning star.

He longs to make it up with Daniel - who has just made history by winning his third Best Actor Oscar for his role in 'Lincoln' - but fears he has been frozen out.

“I made a terrible mistake by helping an author who was writing a so-called biography of Dan,” says Sean. “I only gave him my book (a biography of his father, 'C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life', which Sean wrote in 1980). I wanted him to get the facts right, and he didn’t even do that – he got birthdays on the wrong days. It was full of errors. Anyway, he acknowledged my help in the foreword and Dan saw that and completely blew me out of the water. He phoned me up and told me to '------- get a life’. '---- off,’ he said. I couldn’t get a word in. That was in 1994, and that was our last conversation.”

Before Daniel's father, poet Cecil Day-Lewis, wed his mother Jill Balcon in 1951, he was married to Mary King, the daughter of a master at Sherborne School in Dorset. The pair had two children, Sean and Nicholas, half-siblings to Daniel and his sister Tamasin.

Sean, now 81, was a journalist – formerly the television critic of The Telegraph – and lives in East Devon, a few miles from the old family home.

He was doing National Service in the RAF when his father wrote telling him he was leaving the family home to move in with Balcon, then aged 23, just five years older than Sean. In his biography Sean says his father’s actions left “scorched earth… in his wake”. “

Sean was 26 when Daniel was born but the two families never lived together.

“We all got on quite well,” he recalls. “Dan was still a boy. I was allowed to beat him at ping-pong. They were a different generation. I thought they were terribly sophisticated. They had a nanny who would present them to their parents in the evening, all brushed up and turned out, for a story from my Pa.”

When Cecil died from pancreatic cancer in 1972, however, things soured. Sean, having got his father’s permission before his death, embarked on a biography of Cecil, which Daniel, Tamasin and, initially, Jill helped with. But Balcon became upset when Sean documented his father's many affairs. “She really came to hate me from when the book came out.”

From then on, he and Daniel drifted apart. "He wrote me quite a supportive letter when my book came out, saying he didn’t want to join in the vendetta. We were still friends but I didn’t visit the house any more.”

Sean continued to support his half-brother’s career.  After Day-Lewis’ infamous performance of Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989 – during which he walked offstage mid-act, having allegedly seen the ghost of his father – they had lunches.

But a few years later, Sean received the phone call that ended his relationship with Daniel.

Is he proud of his brother's success? "Absolutely. I just wish my father had been around, because when he was alive, Dan was a bit of a tearaway and not expected to do very much... Dan’s not only the best actor, but he’s the best person at doing those acceptance speeches,” he adds. “That elegant way of his is terribly copied from my father. He’s very keen and ambitious, but on the surface rather modest and gentlemanly.”

Does he hope, one day, to end the silence? “Yes, I would like that,” he says. “Very much.”