He doses his performances with droppers, but when he returns to the screen, he is fully committed to the project, and gives himself body and soul. Like his American colleague Robert De Niro, the British Daniel Day-Lewis is capable of transforming himself into the most unlikely characters with effort and dedication. He learned to paint with his feet while confined to a wheelchair to star in My Left Foot , and spent time in the woods building canoes for The Last of the Mohicans .

In spite of everything, it seems that the cinema has not given him the personal satisfaction he expected in return. Disenchanted with the seventh art, he lives away from the screens to which he only returns in specific cases. So far this millennium they have managed to get him out of retirement From him Martin Scorsese (Gangs Of New York ), his wife, Rebecca Miller ( The Ballad of Jack and Rose ) and now the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson , under whose orders he has shotWells of ambition .

Born on April 29, 1957 in London, Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis comes from a family related to art and cinema. His father was the renowned poet Cecil Day-Lewis, while his mother, the actress Jill Balcon , was the daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, the creator of the mythical Ealing studios, responsible for the golden age of british comedy. His older sister, Lydia Tamasin, is also dedicated to the seventh art as a documentary director.

Since his mother took him to the theater when he was little, Daniel knew that he wanted to dedicate his life to acting, and he combined his school studies with the Old Vic School of Dramatic Art in Bristol. Although he does not even appear in the credits, at the age of twelve he made his debut with a very small role, as a thug boy inSunday Damn Sunday , by John Schlesinger . At that same age he represented plays with his classmates from the aforementioned school. Taking too many migraine pills, he was committed to an asylum, where convincing the doctors of his mental health was “the best performance” of his life, in his own words. The death of his father was a great blow to him, an episode that caused him such strong trauma that he even claims that the ghost of his mother appeared to him during a performance of “Hamlet”.

Focused on the stage and television in his early years, he was slow to return to film, with supporting roles inGandhi (1982) andMutiny on board (1984). In 1985, Stephen Frears chose him to play Johnny, the punk fromMy beautiful laundry . Soon after he cemented his prestige as Cecil Vyse, the refined lawyer ofA Room with a View , in which James Ivory adapted the famous novel by EM Forster . Just as famous was the novelThe Unbearable Lightness of Being , which Philip Kaufman adapted for film with Day-Lewis as Dr. Tomas, a sex-obsessed guy who becomes involved in the events of the Prague Spring.

Thrown fully into the role of a real character, invalid artist and writer Christy Brown, wowed the crowd. “On the screen there is no actor who plays a disabled person; there is a true mental paralytic ”, a critic said of him regarding his work inMy Left Foot , the first of three fruitful collaborations between the actor and Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan . Even the Hollywood Academy surrendered to his talent, and awarded him the Oscar for best actor.

After undergoing a period of intense training, and getting muscular, the actor obtains one of his greatest commercial successes withThe Last of the Mohicans . Thanks to his imaginative visual style, filmmaker Michael Mann began to stand out with this adaptation of the Fenimore Cooper novel. He also puts himself under the command of Martin Scorsese for the first time, in the elegantThe Age of Innocence , based on a novel by Edith Wharton .

Passionate about Ireland, he was nationalized as a citizen of this country, where he moved his residence in 1993. That same year he would repeat his collaboration with Sheridan in the excellentIn the name of the father , which recreated the tragedy of Gerry Conlon , a young man from Northern Ireland wrongly accused of belonging to the IRA and of an attack he did not commit. This time, the unconscious interpreter wanted to know what his character felt behind bars and ended up spending three days in an isolation cell. Luckily no one has proposed to play an arsonist, lest he take to setting fire to forests…

As a result of his relationship with the French actress Isabelle Adjani , the actor’s first child would be born, but it didn’t take long for him to break up with his mother, and rumor has it that for this he sent her a fax, instead of explaining it to him in his own words. In 1996, he married the screenwriter and filmmaker Rebecca Miller , daughter of the famous playwright Arthur Miller , one of whose works,The crucible , was precisely starred in film by Day-Lewis. With Rebecca, the actor has had three other children.

InThe Boxer , joins Sheridan one last time, to analyze the new situation in Northern Ireland, after the implementation of the peace processes. The public responds, but Daniel Day-Lewis, in his line, gets so into the role that apparently he lost his own personality. And of course, when he finishes he feels quite stressed. He begins a five-year hiatus to become a student of a master shoe craftsman in Florence. “I was exhausted both physically and artistically. In addition, I believed that I had given everything as an interpreter and I thought that my retirement would be final, ”explained the actor.

It was not easy to get him out of there, and Martin Scorsese had to beg him for a long time, and even sent Leonardo DiCaprio to Italy, to convince him to accept the role of bloody mafia boss inGangs of New York . In the end, he recovered his method of integral assimilation of the character, and began to practice handling knives by cutting pork fillets. His impeccable work was rewarded with another Oscar nomination, in 2002, but it still took him three years to return to the movies, with The Ballad of Jack and Rose . Since then. He hadn’t even considered giving moviegoers joy, until he got the script for Pozos de ambición, written by Paul Thomas Anderson. She was enthusiastic about it, to the point that immediately after reading it she promised to return from exile to shoot the film. Thank goodness he said yes. Anderson sent him the script when we were three-quarters of the way through on the film, and he had told us that if he didn’t accept it, he couldn’t move on,” says producer JoAnne Sellar.