PLAYING Hamlet at the National Theatre in London seven years ago, Daniel Day Lewis had an emotional breakdown. As the actor playing Hamlet's father's ghost bid his son a final adieu, Day Lewis went silent, abruptly left the stage and was found slumped in the wings, sobbing uncontrollably. He later said he had convinced himself he was talking to his own father.
When he married actress Rebecca Miller, daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller, in a private ceremony in Vermont last Wednesday week, he said of his new father in law: "There's something about Arthur Miller that makes you wish he was your father."
His father was Cecil Day Lewis, the English poet laureate who died when Daniel was 14. The following year he took an overdose of migraine tablets and received psychiatric treatment, but the actor insists the two incidents are unrelated. What is related is how his father's political beliefs first shaped his son's career.
Cecil Day Lewis, an ex member of the British Communist Party and a man of strong socialist beliefs, sent the young Daniel to a state run school in the London working class area of Charlton where he quickly adopted the accent, behaviour and demeanour of his peers and rid himself of any trace of his literary Greenwich home life.
His biographer, Garry Jenkins, suggests this was Daniel Day Lewis's first foray into method acting, the technique which sees the actor submerging his/her body and voice into the character they are playing. Coincidentally it is the acting technique which is taught at Bristol's Old Vic Theatre School where he learnt his craft.
Regarded as one of the finest actors of his generation, his versatility has seen him play a gay punk rocker in My Beautiful Laundrette, a Czech doctor in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, a disabled writer in My Left Foot (for which he won an Oscar), an Irish dentist in Eversmile New York and an 18th century warrior in The Last Of The Mohicans. The stories about his commitment to the method are legion: while filming My Left Foot he remained in his chair and had to be fed by spoon even outside working hours.
From role to role, he has made himself unrecognisable, erasing every last nuance of his personal identity in the quest for total union with his screen character. He says he feels compelled to take on roles alien to his own experience and, while he does use all manner of artifice (insisting on being called Gerry and speaking in a Belfast accent on and off the set of In The Name Of The Father), he builds up his character from the inside, by way of an impenetrable interior process that frees his imagination to relate, bit by bit, an absolute understanding of the life he has chosen to take on. He rations his roles out and during the past 10 years he has only made 10 films.
The integrity and intelligence he brings to his roles is reflected in how he conducts himself within his profession. Not one to appear on the cover of Hello! magazine welcoming readers into his home or to inform Vanity Fair about his love life, he remains aloof from the media feeding frenzy that usually accompanies celebrity status. When asked to be interviewed by Garry Jenkins for his biography, he declined, merely saying he had "not yet done, enough to warrant a biography".
For such a private, and friends say unassuming man, he has unfortunately been involved in a number of tabloid friendly relationships. His name has been linked at various times with Juliette Binoche, Julia Roberts, Sinead O'Connor and Winona Ryder. Until two years ago he was involved in a volatile relationship with French actress Isabelle Adjani who gave birth to his son, Gabriel, now 18 months old. Ms Adjani told reporters that she was "profoundly depressed" when he finished their relationship, by fax, when she was seven months pregnant.
The proud holder of an Irish passport, his paternal grandparents were from Dublin and his father was born in Co Laois. Childhood holidays were spent in Mayo and Connemara. Both he and his sister, Tasmin, who is three years older than him and a documentary maker, refer to Ireland as "home". He keeps a house in Wicklow along with residences in London and New York.
He met his wife, Rebecca (34), on the set of his new film, an adaptation of his father in law's The Crucible. They had been secretly dating for a year and the wedding service was only attended by 15 people. Just days before the wedding, he exploded in anger at a press conference when asked about his relationship with Rebecca.
By all accounts the couple will now settle in New York and continue their separate acting careers. Daniel Day Lewis once said of his family "it is awesome to think you are carrying on the family name". Something his new wife will understand.
