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In Day-Lewis, who was reared in England yet carries an Irish passport, there is a strong streak of Eire: the tale-spinning, the mordant thoughtfulness, the smile in his soft voice that lightens his remarks with a puckish irony. His father Cecil was the Irish-born poet laureate of England. His mother is actress Jill Balcon, whose Baltic Jewish father, Sir Michael Balcon, ran Ealing Studios, Britain's renowned comedy factory. Daniel's sister Tamasin, four years older, is a documentary filmmaker and writer on food.
Daniel grew up in the middle-class London suburb of Greenwich. Home life was akin to A Room with a View; street life was My Beautiful Laundrette, a jumble of good times and hard prejudices. "In my case," he says in his gently urgent, upper-class voice, "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. But children are very adaptable. They're 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 town, took on his first role and accent: that of the working-class lad. "To me, it was absolutely unconscious. It was raw survival."
Survival proved harder when he was sent to Sevenoaks School in Kent. "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, so you never talk 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 in amused, ironic perspective. Day-Lewis knows Sevenoaks was no dead end; it was where he found his two vocations: cabinetmaking and acting.
His first acting role, in a Sevenoaks production of Cry, the Beloved Country, was, typically, 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 legally disruptive influence." Soon after, he made his fleeting film debut, as a young vandal in Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
In the Sevenoaks workshop, 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 used it for years." That first experience working with wood "was the start of what became one of my greatest abiding loves."
He has no regrets about Bedales, the liberal school where Tamasin was already boarding. Students worked in the loom house, the pottery barn, the woodwork shop. "I had the happiest days of my life there," he says. "After I left, I struggled for a year and a half in a fog of gloom from the sheer loss of that place."