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The critical acclaim of his latest performance in There Will Be Blood comes close to eclipsing the many garlanded performances in Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting career. But, as FOCUS discovers, it’s all in a day’s work.
The carpentry skills that Daniel Day-Lewis allegedly learned in preparation for his role as John Proctor in The Crucible will be useful this awards season. At the very least a new shelf will be required, or perhaps a fetching display cabinet to house the many acting prizes that have been accorded for his performance as Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood.
And while the respective BAFTA and Oscar voting members may yet pull off a surprise by handing the Best Actor award to one of his fellow nominees, no-one seriously expects that to happen. So the famous mask, and the statuesque ‘Golden Boy’ seem certain to find themselves standing side by side in Day-Lewis’s adopted Irish home.
What impresses reviewers and audiences alike about the way an actor such as Daniel Day-Lewis works is his ability to transform into a new character from film to film. He has the movie idol looks, the personal charisma and evident intelligence yet has professional standards that would be affronted if he ever coasted through a film and ‘phoned a performance in,’ as industry jargon has it.
Not for him the easy pay day and undemanding role, he responds instead to the challenge of getting under the skin of a diverse range of characters diametrically different from himself.
He was the writer Christy Brown, trapped in an unresponsive body in My Left Foot and yet was equally convincing as the heroic Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans. He embodied the falsely accused Gerry Conlon in In The Name of the Father and embraced the uncompromising Bill The Butcher in Gangs of New York.
And now there's Plainview, a tough product of harsh times whose oil prospecting skills make him a very wealthy man. But money does not bring him happiness or contentment, it calcifies his heart and reinforces his cynical world view. "I have a competition in me," Plainview says at one point in the film, "I want no-one else to succeed. I hate most people. At times I look at people and see nothing worth liking."
In this regard Plainview and Day-Lewis could not be more different, for the actor possesses a compassion in his performances and a genuine niceness that is aptly expressed in the relationship he formed with screen son Dillon Freasier, who plays H.W. Plainview.
"Dillon is a local boy from Fort Davis," Day-Lewis explains, "which is a town about 10 miles from Marfa. He was a rancher, a genuine cowboy, he worked with his father in round ups and branding and everything else as part of the seasonal life of a rancher.
"He had a great head on his shoulders, a wonderful self possessed, beautiful young man. But I really worried for him because he’d never made a movie. We got along really well, we were friends before we started shooting and at a given moment I really felt I needed to explain to him the deal. I said ‘in a few days time we’re going to be in the story and I’m going to speaking to you harshly sometimes, I’m not going to be speaking to you well……'.
"He looked at me like I was insane, like 'what are you telling me that for?'. I said 'you know that I love you?', and he said 'I know that, leave me alone,'. So he got on with it, and he cured me of my instinct to be over protective of him."
The paternal instinct is understandable in Day-Lewis, as he is a father of three himself. But, when asked, he is quick to deny any suggestion that the parenting in the film holds any echoes of his relationship with his own father, former Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis.
"My relationship with my own father was much less complex than you might have been led to believe," he says with a smile. "He was just a man I never really got to know, there's nothing really complex about that. In later years reassessing what might have been a relationship with my father, that’s where the complexity is, I suppose, because as men we tend to measure ourselves against our fathers."
Where the father triumphed in his own artistic endeavours, the son has unquestionably made his mark in the field of acting. Sunday night at the Royal Opera House will confirm it, and a fortnight later the Academy Awards may well provide a fitting climax to a tremendous performance.
Daniel Day-Lewis himself is likely to meet such triumphs with characteristic modesty and self effacing charm. "I just try to step backwards and ask myself if I can serve the story. I don't really know what the challenge was here, it was to try and do as well as I could."
ANWAR BRETT
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