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Daniel Day-Lewis
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Spouse
Rebecca Miller (I) (13 November 1996 - present)
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Some call him the British De Niro, and this darkly handsome leading man certainly qualifies for the title. Like his American counterpart, DayLewis immerses himself in his characters, sometimes affecting physical changes to make his performances more truthful. For The Last of the Mohicans (1992), he engaged in rigorous bodybuilding to make credible his portrayal of an 18th-century outdoorsman raised by Indians. The grandson of British film producer Sir Michael Balcon and the son of poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, he studied drama at the Bristol Arts Centre. His first film was Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). After minor roles in Gandhi (1982) and The Bounty (1984), Day-Lewis startled moviegoers as a homosexual tough boy (with multicolored hair) in Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). That caught the attention of the Merchant/Ivory production team, which cast him as an upperclass twit in A Room With a View (1985). Americans who saw that film and Laundrette within the same year were more keenly aware that a major new talent was on the scene. (Unfortunately, his first American-made film, 1988's Stars and Bars was simply dreadful.) In keeping with his habit of extensive preparation, Day-Lewis studied the Czechoslovakian language and adopted a Czech accent as Tomas in Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and lived in a wheelchair for weeks to create his Oscarwinning characterization of quadriplegic Irish writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989). It is not known what steps he took to prepare for Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993, as Edith Wharton's repressed hero) and In the Name of the Father (also 1993, Oscar-nominated as an Irish man falsely convicted as a terrorist). |  |
