Daniel Day-Lewis

Torture as a Working Method

Daniel Day-Lewis announced his retirement from film in June 2017. He did so through a brief statement from his representative that gave no reasons. That decision closed a career in which the number of films made mattered far less than the process of building them.

The actor was never a rent-a-face.

He grew up in 1950s London in a family of intellectuals. His father was poet Cecil Day-Lewis, and his mother was actress Jill Balcon. But Daniel preferred the streets of south London, where he learned to imitate accents to keep the neighborhood kids from beating him up for his upper-middle-class background.

Before shooting My Left Foot in 1989, he broke two ribs. He refused to leave the wheelchair even when the cameras were off, because he wanted to feel Christy Brown's real paralysis. Production crew had to feed him with a spoon during breaks.

He won his first Oscar for that role. It marked the beginning of a method built on isolation and technical obsession. Before shooting The Last of the Mohicans in 1992, he spent months living in the forest. He learned to hunt, skin animals and build canoes with his own hands.

But the Hollywood system was physically wearing him down.

The Florence Shoemaker and the Comeback

He disappeared from the screen for five years in the late 1990s. He moved to Italy to work as an apprentice shoemaker under Stefano Bemer. Only Martin Scorsese managed to lure him out of that workshop to play Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, released in 2002.

During that shoot in Rome, he came down with severe pneumonia. He refused to wear a modern coat because the garment did not exist in the nineteenth century. That stubbornness nearly cost him his life, but it earned him another Academy Award nomination.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2007, he worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood. His performance as Daniel Plainview is a study of greed and hatred that earned him his second Oscar. International critics agreed that no one in his generation handled silence with such intensity.

The Record and the Final Silence

Steven Spielberg persuaded him in 2012 to play Abraham Lincoln after years of refusals. Day-Lewis spent a full year reading about the president and texting actress Sally Field in the language of the era. In 2013, he became the only actor to win three Oscars for Best Actor.

Because his commitment to the script outweighed any commercial logic.

His last film was Phantom Thread in 2017. For the role of Reynolds Woodcock, he learned to sew and recreated a Balenciaga dress from scratch. The filming process was so depressing for him that he decided never to stand in front of a camera again.

He lives in semi-retirement on a rural estate in County Wicklow, Ireland. In January 2024, he resurfaced at an awards ceremony to present an award to Martin Scorsese. The director suggested they might still have an unfinished collaboration, to the actor's total silence.

His primary residence is estimated to be worth around €4 million.