Daniel Gets His Day

Richard Corliss

Time, European Edition
March 21, 1994

IT IS AN ACTOR'S PASSION TO observe the world. It is his art to become what he observes. And finally, it is his job to let the world observe him. It is hard work reconciling the natures of voyeur and exhibitionist. And when stardom falls on an actor, it is tougher to play the role expected by the press and public: himself.

Daniel Day-Lewis is one such observer observed. "I do enjoy being amongst people,'' he says. ''I don't enjoy being amongst people as an object of scrutiny. I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people. And I do bitterly resent the fact that that's not always possible anymore. When the mantle of the observer is taken away from you, and you become the observed -- when the cloak which allows you to observe is stripped from you -- then the most useful and fascinating tool of your work is taken with it.

Yet the world watches Day-Lewis. And with good reason. At 36 he is probably the most accomplished film actor of his generation: handsome and wily, fierce and delicate, bold enough to submerge himself in a role, strong enough for his charismatic intelligence to shine through. He knows the camera is an X ray, a polygraph, a demanding lover searching his face for hints of lies and evasion. Directors and screenwriters can hide behind their cameras and word processors, but onscreen the actor is naked, in close-up. He had better not just act his character but be it as well. That is Day-Lewis' goal and gift: to be so true to his characters that they need never be sentimentalized, made to seem finer or grander or wickeder or more appealing.

His range is extraordinary: he can play upper class or working class, English or Irish or American. In 1985 his first two major English movies opened: A Room with a View, in which he played a purring Edwardian snob, and My Beautiful Laundrette, where he was a streak-haired ex-fascist gay punk. Just like that, a chameleonic star was born.

The Day-Lewis gallery grew. He earned an Oscar for best actor as Christy Brown, the Irish painter and writer crippled with cerebral palsy, in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot. He was elevated to dreamboat status as Hawkeye, woodland warlord, in The Last of the Mohicans.

His latest two films display new versatility and virtuosity. He is Newland Archer, the sensitive 1870s New York lawyer, in Martin Scorsese's rapturously sedate The Age of Innocence. He is Irish hell-raiser Gerry Conlon, framed with his dad (Oscar nominee Pete Postlethwaite) for an IRA bombing, in Sheridan's In the Name of the Father. They make an amazing double feature, Newland and Gerry, these two men in their own prisons -- one surrendering his passion to Old New York civility, the other maturing from Belfast bad boy to crusading son.

Newland represents perhaps the most pristine and focused work of Day-Lewis career. In the Name of the Father, a triumph of sustained and shaded rage, last month won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Day-Lewis a nomination for best actor next week at the Academy Awards ceremony. He probably won't win; Tom Banks is considered a lock for his role as an AIDS sufferer in Philadelphia. But even if that happens, it will be a tribute to Day-Lewis' Hollywood clout because he was offered and declined the Hanks role -as he did the role of Lestat, now taken by Tom Cruise, in Interview with the Vampire.

Day-Lewis sometimes hints that he thinks interviewers are vampires. Many journalists do go rabid whenever they sight him. They dog his trail and read Freudian motives into his every move. They trace back many important events in his life -- his notorious 1989 Hamlet, his moving to Ireland, even his decision to make In the Name of the Father -- to the death of his own dad, Cecil Day-Lewis, when Daniel was 15. They want to track every blip on the actor's sexual radar, and lacking solid evidence, they link him with his female co-stars. They paint him as reclusive, somber, certifiably weird.

Even the mild prospect of a conversation for a newsmagazine makes him itchy. "Interviews are God's great joke on me," he says wryly, as he sits in a Dublin hotel room 45 minutes from his County Wicklow home. ''I do enjoy chatting with people, but I don't particularly enjoy talking about myself.'' Then he makes an Irishman's deal with his visitor and himself: ''We'll just think about the pint of Guinness hovering at the end of this!''

In Day-Lewis, who carries an Irish passport, there is a strong streak of Eire: the tale spinning, the thoughtfulness, the smile in his soft voice that lightens his remarks with a gentle irony. ''I think this is a country where it is easier not to be cynical,'' he says, "to retain hope of a certain kind. But it's also the legacy of that profoundly affecting period of childhood, where both beautiful things and hideous things, experiences and visions, become part of you. A large part of the beauty about my childhood came from this place, and that has never left us. My father always made sure that we thought of this place."

Cecil Day-Lewis, the Irish-born poet and novelist, helped create an informal, socially committed prosody in British verse of the '30s; his later work dwelt on his Irish heritage and memories of his County Laoighis childhood home (now owned by actor John Hurt) . In 1968 he was named poet laureate of Britain. Fifty-three when Daniel was born, Cecil died of cancer in 1972. Daniel's mother was actress Jill Balcon, whose Baltic Jewish father, Sir Michael Balcon, was the impresario of Ealing Studios, producer of Britain's most delightful postwar comedies. Daniel's sister Tamasin, four years older, is now a documentary filmmaker and writer on food.

Daniel grew up in the London suburb of Greenwich, which he describes as "a middle-class enclave surrounded by the towns where the ((neofascist)) National Front marches took place. That was the life, and it was rough. Everyone was into gangs and scrapping. I was sort of fascinated and yet removed from that very aggressive male world. I was in a gang. I wasn't much good to them, but I had a couple of protectors, and if I got a belt, they made sure someone else got three!" Daniel's parents sent him to local schools; they wanted him to feel a part of the real world. ''So I'd take friends back to tea, and it never occurred to me that perhaps it was a bizarre experience for them to walk into a Georgian house in Greenwich.'' Home life, then, was akin to A Room with a View; street life was more like My Beautiful Laundrette.

Like most remembered childhoods, Daniel's is a jumble of good times and hard times, staunch friendships and blithe prejudices. ''In my case," he says, "they could have chosen any one of a number of insults, since I was Irish and Jewish, and from a different class to most of the kids. They knew that because of my voice; in England, everyone knows you according to the way you speak. But children are very adaptable. Children are great performers: they perform for their parents all the time, to find out how to get what they want.'' And so Daniel, from the posh side of the tracks, took on his first role and accent: that of the working-class lad. ''My sister would ask me, 'Why do you talk like that when you're with your mates?' To her, there was hypocrisy involved. To me, it was absolutely unconscious. It was raw survival."

Survival proved harder when the boy, whose father wanted him to get into an academic environment and out of trouble, was sent to Sevenoaks School in Kent. To Daniel, ''the place was alien and unattractive in every single one of its millions of details. A feeling of nausea stayed with me from the moment I got there until the moment I left. And there was the code of honor, which means you never tell anyone about your suffering. So you have to do it in silence. Or find a place where you can be on your own and scream." This is the voice of the actor-dramatist, who can both live in the moment of that schoolboy misery and glance back on it in amused perspective. Day-Lewis knows Sevenoaks was no dead end, for it was there he discovered his two vocations: cabinetmaking and acting.

"It was a school for academic achievers and athletes,'' he says, "and if you weren't one or the other, you were useless.'' Daniel had been a first- class footballer and, until a few years ago, played often and hard for a National Theatre squad and other teams, but Sevenoaks sapped his sportsman's spirit. ' 'I became a nonperson. At Sevenoaks all the nonpeople congregated in the art room -- as they do in private schools all over the world -- and there we became proud of our marginalization, our refugee status. That sense of alienation is a powerful spur to the creative instinct. So I became a nonconformist. You know: there are 500 boys in straw hats, and one of them sets fire to his hat. I mean, there was nowhere else for my energy to go except into being a nuisance.''

Even his introduction to acting -- the tyro thespian trod the boards in a production of Cry, the Beloved Country -- was a cue for school rebellion. ''I was playing a little black boy. I had to cover myself in black makeup, and what gave me the greatest pleasure was that I could never wash all of it off. Every night it sullied the sheets. For once I could be a disruptive influence -- with the excuse to be legally disruptive!" When he was 12 or 13, he made his (fleeting) film debut, as a young vandal in Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

His one productive pleasure was in the Sevenoaks workshop, where 12-year-old Daniel ' 'demanded to make a Ping-Pong table, which to their credit they let me do. All my life's ambition went into this table. I took it home: we put it in the basement and used it for years. That was the beginning of what became one of my greatest abiding loves.'' Later he would fashion more sophisticated pieces: a Welsh dresser; a round dining table of pine and walnut, with caned chairs, which his mother keeps. He hoped to make a career of it. ''I still have fantasies," he says, ''of apprenticing with a cabinetmaker -- purely to have contact with wood, because it does have a very particular effect on your sensibility. But I seem to talk about cabinetmaking in that boring way people talk about things they don't do anymore. Maybe I'm vocalizing my regret about it.''

He has no regrets about Bedales, the liberal school where Tamasin was already boarding and to which he transferred at age 12. ''It was paradise on earth, ' he says. At Bedales, nonacademic activities were an essential part of the curriculum; students worked in the house of looms, the pottery barn, the woodworking shop where he toiled in ecstasy. ''They weren't things you did in extra time,'' he says. ''They were things you spent half your life doing. I had the happiest days of my life there. After I left, I struggled for a year and a half in a fog of gloom from the sheer loss of that place."

Out of the fog and into the footlights: Daniel joined the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which allowed students to appear in productions of the parent company. Postlethwaite, a Bristol Old Vic stalwart, saw the young man play an ! angry schoolboy in Nigel Williams' Class Enemy. ''He's doing now what he was back then --nothing new,' ' Postlethwaite says admiringly. ''We all saw all this extraordinary pyrotechnic work going on, and we thought, 'Oh, no, not another one of these! Can't we lose him somewhere?' " No chance --not with Day-Lewis' talent, drive, profile. After a stint with the Little Theatre Company, he joined the West End hit Another Country, which also spawned Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett and Cohn Firth as bright stars of Britain's '80s.

In 1984 he played Romeo for the Royal Shakespeare Company. One fateful day toward the end of the run, he went to the Barbican, the company's London home, to discuss his future. ''I was met by a panel of six or seven directors on one side of the table and a chair on the other. I was so bowled over by the pretentiousness of that one gesture that I knew instantly my brief and rather soiled love affair with the R.S.C. was finished for good. I thought, 'I've been working my nuts off for four months trying to make something, and I know I haven't been great, but loosen up, boys, let's talk about it.' I explained that I wasn't happy, and they assumed I had been offered a role in a film. And suddenly it was as if I'd become the principal of a kindergarten. I said, 'I have the pleasure to inform you that I have no other work -- neither film nor television nor theater. But I would rather be out of work than be unhappy with the Royal Shakespeare Company."

In 1986 he appeared -- most happily -- as Mayakovsky in the National Theatre production of Dusty Hughes' The Futurists, directed by Richard Eyre. Three years later, he once more teamed with Eyre at the National for a Hamlet that will long live in theater lore. Day-Lewis' Dane was less melancholy than melodramatic -- an agitated youth who raced across his world of a stage as if late for a date with doom. It was a reckless, bravura turn that could sap any actor's strength. In the middle of a performance one night, Day-Lewis left the stage and did not return.

The theater pages were full of lurid speculation: that he had seen his father as the ghost and was driven daft, etc. Ah, the genius-madman! Well, insists the star, ''I have no bad feelings about that night. Nor do I have any bad feelings about my father, my father's ghost, the ghost of Hamlet, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Richard Eyre or the National Theatre. But I am continually encouraged to have had feelings by those who want to perpetuate this idea because one night, in a moment of exhaustion, I left the stage and didn't go back again."

Dame Judi Dench, who played Gertrude in the National Hamlet, won't speak of Day-Lewis' leave-taking. She does allow that ''Dan is happier in film than in theater. Filming can be a more private affair, and I think that suits him better. In the theater there are many many distractions. I think to Dan the theater is more artificial."

Day-Lewis has long had a love-hate relationship with theater. And these days, you can hold the love. He says he is infuriated at the traditional notion ''that film is the Faustian sellout. I personally think there are works in cinema history which have as much to say to us as any great piece of theater. And I am speaking as someone who loves the theater -- or tries to love it. But the fact is that most of the time when I go to the theater, I am bored to distraction."

Sheridan took him recently to a couple of plays. Never again. "I always carry a pocketknife with me," Day-Lewis says with a wide grin, "and at one point I started stabbing him. I just wanted to get out! At that moment I was more a potential alcoholic than at any time in my life, because all I could think of was the pint across the road.''

He will not renounce the prospect of future stage work, listing Richard II, Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi as plays that entice him. ''But it's never been an overriding ambition of mine," he says, "to become what they call in Britain a classical actor. It's been a number of people's ambition on my behalf -- but that's just because of my nose! I was given a nose they couldn't wait to put into various costumes and move around the stage." He believes other actors of his generation share his preference for pictures. "Let me assure you that in Britain young actors long to work in films. And it's not because they think working in films is going to buy them large houses in California. It's because they have a sense of the importance of film in contemporary society."

The beginning of Day-Lewis' adult work in films was a bit part in the 1982 film Gandhi. Soon he was in the South Seas shooting The Bounty, where he skulks and sulks handsomely as a craven officer under Anthony Hopkins' Captain Bligh. It was the first of many roles in which he cast himself against heroic type. He has the firm jaw and sensuous good looks to play any modern (or classic) leading man. Instead, believing acting was a nonstop education in the spectrum of personality, he went for characters at odds with his own.

First was Johnny, spin-dried by love and victimized by Pakistani Thatcherism, in My Beautiful Laundrette. Next was A Room with a View. For the interview with director James Ivory, he showed up in his two-tone punkster hairstyle from Laundrette -- ''It looked like a shaving brush, ' ' he says, laughing. when Ivory asked whether he saw himself as brave, gentle George Emerson or the myopic fop Cecil Vyse, Day-Lewis replied, ''No one in his right mind would ever admit to seeing himself as Cecil. But that's the character I'd like to play."

Cecil, an esthete stranded in sunniest Surrey, is a figure of fun, but flay- Lewis also offers glimpses of understanding -- as when Cecil tells his mother he plans to send his children ''to Italy . . . for subtlety," and a little smile tinges his lips at this minor mot juste. It is an early example of flay-Lewis' knack for commenting on a character even as he becomes it. He is simultaneously surgeon and patient.

In a few of his films released in 1988 and '89, the patient died. In Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars, everyone looks misused, including Day-Lewis, who toward the end must scramble naked through a Manhattan trash bin. In Carlos Sorin's Eversmile, New Jersey, he was a missionary dentist in Patagonia; the film was only barely released. In his first big-time American movie, Philip Kaufman's version of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he gave an emotionally passive performance, as co-stars Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin got to do all the heavy uplifting.

Sheridan, who wrote the screenplay for My Left Foot with Shane Connaughton, had been impressed by Day-Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette. "His entrance was great, '' the director says. "You can tell in five seconds if somebody has screen presence. And then a fellow told me that Daniel had an Irish passport, and I just went zooomp!" The script slipped through the actor's letter slot like a ray of light at dusk. ''I was just grateful, '' Day-Lewis says, ''that these people I had never met had rekindled a desire to work.'' His performance, one of great tact as much as strength, landed him in the first rank of serious stars.

Seriously serious. Day-Lewis insists on showing the truth about his characters. So he prepares intensely for each role. Alan Bennett, whose 1986 TV play The Insurance Man was directed by Eyre, wrote this of the young actor in a diary during the film's shooting: ''Dan Day-Lewis, who plays Kafka, has a stooping, stiff-necked walk, which I take to be part of his characterization. It's certainly suited to the role, and it may be derived from the exact physical description of Kafka given by Gustav Janouch. Even so I'm not sure if the walk is Kafka or Dan, since he's so conscientious he seldom comes out of character between takes and I never see him walking otherwise."

His preparation for each film is a challenge of heroic proportions and minute detail. While making My Left Foot, he stayed in his wheelchair even when not on camera, and taught himself to paint with his foot. For The Last of the Mohicans he learned how to skin animals and shoot muskets. "We designed a nine-month curriculum for his becoming Hawkeye," director Michael Mann says. ''Daniel is the most incredible athlete that I have worked with. I've never seen anyone acquire certain skills as rapidly as he did. Working with him is great -- it's always only about the work.''

In New York for The Age of Innocence, he checked into his Victorian-style hotel as Newland Archer and wandered the city dressed in 1870s' clothes. ''He wore period cologne,' ' recalls Jay Cocks, co-author of the script and a TIME contributor ' 'And he wanted not just the books Newland would have read but the same editions. He knew old books are like little time machines; they have a way of transporting you back.'' During the filming of In the Name of the Father, be lost a substantial amount of weight. For the confession scene, Sheridan says, "we kept him awake in his cell for three nights and interrogated him with real policemen. He was so distraught and tired that the acting changed. But there was no sense of masochism. I mean, the cell was well heated!"

Between takes on the set, Day-Lewis tends to keep to himself, in character. But though he may not fraternize overmuch, he wins his colleagues' admiration. ''He's very generous as an actor,' ' says John Lynch, who played Paul Hill in the Gerry Conlon film. ''And very loose. Once you're certain of a scene's parameters, he gives you a lot of scope to play around," notes Sheridan, a close friend of the actor's. "He does have a kind of rage. I don't know where it comes from, but it's like a white light through a small opening, and it gives him a huge intensity.'' As for his purity, that's exemplified by scenes of extreme restraint and monumental quiet. Like the one in In the Name of the Father, when Gerry-Daniel is told his father is dead, and he just says, ''Thank you.'' ''He'd always just touch the emotion and not try to overdo it," adds Sheridan. ''He's a Samurai warrior, Daniel!

Day-Lewis' methods may be seen as eccentric. ''But it's in those months before the camera starts to turn," he says, "when you get the chance to play the game -- when you have this other life and you can take any avenue toward it. If you become fascinated with another life, then you are fascinated by every aspect of it. The game is that you learn enough to stimulate the imagination into believing in the reality. It is, finally, always an imaginative piece of work. That is the beginning and the end of it.''

It must be tremendously debilitating, this training for a movie marathon of emotional exertions. ''Actually I'm a lazy bastard,'' Day-Lewis says. ''I'm terribly happy doing nothing at all.' ' He has gone without making a film two years, during which he reads, travels, visits friends or -- really -- does nothing at all.

Best of all, he'll ride his beloved Triumph motorbike. He took up the pastime seven years ago in Los Angeles. ' 'I remember so well the sensation of this new thing in my life," he says, rhapsodizing as if over a new love, "this bike that was waiting patiently in the car park for me to decide where I wanted to go. I would lie awake thinking, 'where will the bike take me tomorrow?' I'd invent any excuse to get on it. It's something you never get over. It's always an adventure going somewhere on a bike." Quite an adventure: last year in England he was ticketed and fined for speeding -- 160 km/hr. Going nowhere fast.

Just now, he is at liberty. No definite movie roles in his future, no rue for parts he didn't take. ''I never feel regret that I didn't do one thing or another," he says. ''Never. Maybe there'll be a time when the well dries up and I'll bitterly regret not having made better use of my time. But that's unlikely, because I know I can only be true to the impulses I have. And those impulses come very rarely. The fact is that filmmaking is an appalling process! But memory is fickle. Time and again, you return to a state of ignorance and throw yourself unthinkingly into the fray. I think that if I carried with me a true sense of the experience of filmmaking all the time, I would never make another film!"

He has this humbling and sacred idea: that acting deserves as much craft, sweat and devotion as, say, cabinetmaking. ''Acting is a vocation, '' he insists. ''It has to be acknowledged and respected as such. But in the performing arts, what tends to happen is that people go on contributing way beyond the time when they have anything within themselves to offer. Little by little, that energy is pared away at, until you have no more. By that time, usually it's all you know. It's a job, and you have to pay the bills. I find that sad. I think that as soon as the work ceases to be vocational, you have a responsibility to get out.''

Daniel Day-Lewis wouldn't mind getting out right now, one guesses, on a bike that takes him to no particular place at all. Where he can observe without being stared at, converse without being quoted. Where a consummate actor does not have to act. Where he can just be.