Daniel Day-Lewis

Biography

Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is a three-time Academy Award-winning English actor widely regarded by film critics, scholars, and fellow actors as the greatest, most methodologically dedicated screen actor in motion picture history. The son of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon, Day-Lewis trained at the Bristol Old Vic before bursting into international cinema with extraordinary range, appearing simultaneously as a gay street punk in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and an upper-class Edwardian prig in A Room with a View (1985). He won his first Academy Award for Best Actor for his astounding physical immersion as Christy Brown, an Irish painter with cerebral palsy who could only write and paint using his left foot, in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot (1989). Renowned for his legendary, uncompromising method acting—living completely in character on and off set for the entire duration of productions—Day-Lewis earned Oscar nominations for In the Name of the Father (1993) and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002 as the terrifying nativist butcher William 'Bill the Butcher' Cutting). He won his second Academy Award for Best Actor for his volcanic portrayal of oil tycoon Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), and made Oscar history by winning an unprecedented third Best Actor statuette for portraying the 16th U.S. President in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012). Day-Lewis delivered his final magnificent screen performance in Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017) before his knighthood in 2014. He remains the supreme gold standard of cinematic acting.