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Out of the fog and into the footlights: at 20 Daniel joined the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where he understudied Postlethwaite. Watching the young actor, Postlethwaite recalls, "We all saw all this extraordinary pyrotechnic work going on, and we thought, 'Oh, no, not another one of these! Can't we lose him somewhere?' " Not a chance. Day-Lewis joined the West End hit Another Country, then played Romeo for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1986 he appeared in the National Theatre staging of The Futurists, directed by Richard Eyre. Three years later, he again teamed with Eyre for a notorious Hamlet.
Day-Lewis' was a melodramatic Dane -- an agitated youth who raced across his world of a stage as if late for a date with doom. It was a reckless, bravura turn that could sap any star's strength. In the middle of a performance toward the end of the run, Day-Lewis left the stage and did not return. The theater pages were full of rumors that he had seen his father as the ghost and was driven daft. "I have no bad feelings about my father, my father's ghost, the ghost of Hamlet, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Richard Eyre or the National Theatre. But I am continually encouraged to have bad feelings by those who want to perpetuate this idea because, in a moment of exhaustion, I left the stage and didn't go back again."
Day-Lewis has long had a love-hate relationship with theater. And these days, you can hold the love. He says he is infuriated at the traditional notion "that film is the Faustian sellout. I personally think there are works in cinema history which have as much to say to us as any great piece of theater. It's never been an overriding ambition of mine to become what they call in Britain a classical actor. It's been a number of people's ambition on my behalf -- but that's just because of my nose. I was given a nose they couldn't wait to put into various costumes and move around the stage."
The beginning of Day-Lewis' adult work in films was a bit part in the 1982 Gandhi. Soon he was in the South Seas shooting The Bounty, where he skulks and sulks handsomely as the craven first mate of Anthony Hopkins' Captain Bligh. It was the first of many roles in which he cast himself against heroic type. Believing that acting was a nonstop education in the spectrum of personality, he went for characters at odds with his own: the cynical surgeon in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a wimpy art appraiser in Stars and Bars, a missionary dentist in Eversmile, New Jersey.
Day-Lewis' preparation for each film is a challenge of heroic proportions and minute detail. While making My Left Foot, he stayed in his wheelchair even when not on camera and taught himself to paint with his foot. For The Last of the Mohicans he learned how to skin animals and shoot muskets. In New York for The Age of Innocence, he checked into his Victorian-style hotel as Newland Archer and wandered the city dressed in 1870 clothes. For In the Name of the Father, he lost a substantial amount of weight. In preparation for the scene where his character is battered into making a confession, he stayed awake for three nights, during which director Sheridan arranged to have him mock- interrogated by actual policemen.