Daniel Day-Lewis Biography

Daniel Day-Lewis is a veteran leading man of stage and screen, the winner of three Academy Awards best known for his dramatic intensity in movies such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and Lincoln (2012).

After a successful career on the British stage, Daniel Day-Lewis appeared in supporting roles in Gandhi (1982, starring Ben Kingsley) and The Bounty (1984, with Anthony Hopkins) before moving into leading roles. Famous for his brisk commitment to the craft of acting, Day-Lewis has played refined gentlemen as well as rough-and-tumble bruisers in movies such as A Room With A View (1985), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993) and In the Name of the Father (1993).

He won an Oscar for his performance as Christy Brown, an Irishman afflicted with cerebral palsy, in My Left Foot (1989). Day-Lewis was nominated for another Oscar for In the Name of the Father, but took time off from the movies to perform on stage. After another critically-praised performance in The Boxer (1997), he again took a break from the movies; there were unconfirmed reports that he had worked as a cobbler in Italy before Martin Scorsese talked him into appearing as Bill “The Butcher” Cutting in Gangs of New York (2002, with Leonardo DiCaprio).

Continuing to make himself scarce, he appeared next in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005, written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller) and There Will Be Blood (2007, with Paul Dano), for which he again won the Oscar as best actor. In 2012 he played President Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg‘s hit biopic Lincoln, earning still another Oscar win as best actor.

On June 20, 2017, Daniel Day-Lewis unexpectedly announced his retirement from acting. In a statement issued by his agent, Day-Lewis said he “will no longer be working as an actor.” He gave no reason, calling it a personal decision. If the retirement holds, his last film will have been the 2017 film Phantom Thread, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.