Why bother retiring from show business? No office needs to organise a whip-round for an engraved carriage clock. Also, nobody quite believes you. So many showbiz retirements fail to stick.
Which brings us to Daniel Day-Lewis’s withdrawal from acting in 2017. Good luck to him. Despite a simmering suspicion that, still 1950s-cigarette-commercial handsome at 67, he was, health permitting, always likely to reappear on screen, few were ready for the news this week that he had already been back before the camera. Great puzzlement greeted a Daily Mail story apparently showing the actor shooting a film with Sean Bean in Manchester. Hours later the announcement came that he was appearing in a drama, titled Anemone, directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis.
So a great tradition continues. You get a lot of withdrawn retirements from musicians. Last year, as Barbra Streisand promoted her paving stone of a biography, headlines suggested she had “called time” on her career. “I want to get in my husband’s truck and just wander, hopefully with the children somewhere near us,” she told the BBC. Well, maybe. A full quarter of a century ago Us Weekly magazine announced that Streisand was making a “farewell to public performance”, adding, “this time she means it”. Seven years later she was sharing misty-coloured memories with muddied fans in Celbridge, Co Kildare (and other places as well, to be fair).
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Frank Sinatra knew how to extract drama from a retirement. In 1971, at the end of a charity concert in Hollywood, he ended with a rendition of Earl Brent’s smoky Angel Eyes. “Excuse me while I disappear,” the last line pleaded. The spotlight literally and figuratively went out on Sinatra, and he moved into promised obscurity. “I’ve got things to do, like the first thing is not to do anything at all for eight months,” he later said. Sinatra got through those months, but in 1973 he returned with a hugely successful album called Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. The operation was (or appeared to be) a masterpiece of manipulation. Few comebacks have been greeted with such celebration since the stone was found rolled away on the first Easter Sunday.
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A pattern was here established. If you set your audience weeping at your apparent departure then you more or less guarantee hysterical celebration when you return to fill stadiums. It seems unlikely that Oasis would have generated such excitement in 2024 if they had, for 16 years, continued the run of albums that then paused with Don’t Believe the Truth and Dig Out Your Soul. (Yes, I had to look those up.)
It is surely no coincidence that the most shamelessly theatrical moment in David Bowie’s career came during the interregnum between Sinatra’s “retirement” and the release of Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. At the close of his Ziggy Stardust tour – which lasted past the release of Aladdin Sane – Bowie delivered an apparently heartfelt message to the crowd at the Hammersmith Odeon, in London. “This particular show will remain with us the longest,” he said. “Not only is it the last show of the tour. But it’s the last show we’ll ever do.”
It is now accepted that (this came as a shock to some of the band members) he was referring to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars rather than the whole David Bowie operation, but the suggestion of a Sinatra-style withdrawal to the metaphorical golf course kicked up a fury of media interest. A year later Diamond Dogs emerged and Bowie went back on the road.
So the unconvincing retirement can be used as a promotional tool. That’s one answer.
Nobody believes that’s what’s going on with Day-Lewis. The actor has always had a complicated relationship with his vocation. In 1989 he left the stage during a performance of Hamlet at the National Theatre in London and never acted in a play again. The intensity of his preparation for film roles is the stuff of legend. One can, therefore, understand why he might want to shake off that pressure. In the late 1990s he withdrew from acting for a few years and took up shoemaking. Seven years ago, following the release of Phantom Thread, he looked to have quit for good. Now he’s back.
We are glad to have him. Still, there is great mystique to the theatrical departure that sticks and sticks forever. Nothing that Sinatra or Streisand or Bowie attempted could compare with the baffling, almost supernatural withdrawal of Greta Garbo. After one flop in 1941 she stepped away from the business and simply ceased to be a public figure. “I want to be alone,” she had said in Grand Hotel nine years earlier. That line came to speak for the final four decades of her life. Imagine trying that in the Instagram age.
