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's hard work, reconciling the natures of voyeur and exhibitionist. And when stardom falls on an actor, it is tougher to play the role demanded by the press and public: himself.
It is a role Daniel Day-Lewis would rather avoid. "I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people. And I do bitterly resent that it's not always possible now, because I'm an object of scrutiny. When the cloak which allows you to observe is stripped from you, then the most useful and indeed fascinating tool of your work is taken with it."
Yet the world watches Day-Lewis. And with good reason. At 36, he is arguably 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 anX ray, a polygraph, searching his face for hints of lies and evasion. He had better not just act his character but also be it. That is Day-Lewis' goal and gift: to be so true to his characters that they need never be sentimentalized, made to seem finer, grander, wickeder or more appealing.
Some actors have depth but not breadth. You won't see Robert De Niro or Gerard Depardieu (two actors Day-Lewis greatly admires) play Edwardian dandies. But you will see Daniel Day-Lewis play English goons, Irish louts and American woodsmen. In 1986, in the early bloom of his career, his first two major English movies opened back to back in the U.S. He was a purring snob in A Room with a View, an ex-fascist gay punk in My Beautiful Laundrette. 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 by cerebral palsy, in the 1989 My Left Foot. He reached dreamboat status as Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans (1992). And in his last two films, another rep-company parlay. He is Newland Archer, the sensitive 1870s New York City lawyer, in Martin Scorsese's rapturously sedate The Age of Innocence. He is Irish hell-raiser Gerry Conlon, framed and imprisoned with his saintly dad (Oscar nominee Pete Postlethwaite) for an I.R.A. bombing, in Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father. They are an amazing pair, Newland and Gerry, 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, focused work of Day-Lewis' career. In the Name of the Father, a triumph of sustained and shaded rage, earned Day-Lewis an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He probably won't win; Tom Hanks 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.