Daniel Day-Lewis is a rare hybrid in contemporary Hollywood: a young serious actor with an impressive background on the British stage and screen who also demonstrates potential for becoming a genuine US movie star. One has to look back to the young Laurence Olivier for an adequate comparison.
Intense and chameleon-like, the handsome, dark-haired Day-Lewis first gained international notice for a pair of drastically different portrayals in two 1986 British features: his tough yet touching Johnny, a South London street punk, who transgresses by loving a middle-class Pakistani school chum in Stephen Frears' "My Beautiful Laundrette"; and the less appealing Cecil Vyse, a priggish, bookish fop, whose love is rejected by Helena Bonham Carter in Merchant/Ivory's "A Room With a View". Viewed individually, each is an impressive supporting performance; viewed together, one is astounded by the versatility of the performer.
Day-Lewis trained at the Bristol Old Vic, which he joined as an ensemble member, and appeared in works by Shakespeare, Farquer and Marlowe. In 1982, he assumed the lead role in "Another Country" (1982), which ran for nine months. He also snared a bit part in Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" (1982). Alternating between theater and film, he toured as Romeo in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of "Romeo and Juliet" and then played a sailor who remains loyal to Anthony Hopkins' Captain Bligh in "The Bounty" (1984).
Day-Lewis secured leading man status in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988) with his portrayal of the ambiguously shaded Tomas, a womanizing surgeon caught up in the Soviet occupation of Prague. For "My Left Foot" (1989), the actor won a Best Actor Oscar for his realistic, unsentimental rendering of quadriplegic Irish artist Christy Brown. A surprisingly muscular Day-Lewis returned to the screen as the ax-and-flintlock wielding Hawkeye in Michael Mann's popular version of "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992). He returned to period films as the callow fiance of Winona Ryder in Martin Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence" (1993) then delivered another electrifying performance as Gerald Conlon who was wrongly imprisoned for allegedly participating in an IRA bombing in the biopic "In the Name of the Father" (also 1993), which earned him a second Best Actor Oscar nod. After a three year absence, Day-Lewis was again paired with Winona Ryder, playing the tortured adulterer John Proctor in Nicholas Hytner's fine adaptation of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" (1996). The following year, he revisited the Troubles in Ireland, this time as another IRA prisoner in "The Boxer," delivering yet another searing, highly acclaimed performance. Day-Lewis reteamed with Martin Scorsese for the director's long-awaited opus "Gangs of New York," taking on the plum role of Bill the Butcher, the powerful anti-immigrant gang leader whom Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) believes murdered his father and the catalyst for the explosive unrest that rocked Manhattan in 1863. Day-Lewis delivered a tour-de-force performance as the vicious Bill, an uneducated but deeply shrewd sociopath who callously spills blood as he sees fit and cannily manipulates those around him. It was for his leading role performance that Day-Lewis was awarded his third Academy Award nomination.
Copyright © Baseline 2006.