The director Daniel Day-Lewis felt like he’d known his entire life
From the beginning of his career, Daniel Day-Lewis has worked with some of cinema’s most revered directors, asserting himself as a necessary talent in the British film landscape.
One of his most significant early roles came in 1985 when he starred as Johnny, a former right wing punk who begins a relationship with a Pakistani-British man, in Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette. The film showed Day-Lewis’ talent as well as his penchant for challenging roles, something he continued to take on throughout the rest of his career.
From Jim Sheridan’s My Last Foot, in which he played an artist living with cerebral palsy, to Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, demonstrating a knack for opulent period dramas, Day-Lewis’s tenure as an actor has spread genres and eras. However, the now-retired actor always picked his roles carefully, meaning most of his movies have ended up being highly acclaimed.
One of the most impressive performances of his career came in 2007 when he joined forces with Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood. The film, set between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, features the actor as Daniel Plainview, a businessman who will do whatever it takes in the quest for oil, which brings him to Paul and Eli Sunday, twins who live on a stretch of land that is home to the stuff. Subsequently, violence, deception, and chaos erupt as Daniel ruthlessly attempts to secure his fortune.
There Will Be Blood is a compelling commentary on the rise of capitalism in the United States and how individuals will resort to selfish means of attaining security and financial greed, even if that involves betraying and harming others. The movie, which also starred Paul Dano in a leading role opposite Day-Lewis, was a hit, and many consider it one of the greatest films of the 21st century.
Day-Lewis instantly connected with Anderson, so much so that they reteamed for Phantom Thread in 2017, the actor’s final acting role before retirement. The period piece, set in ‘50s London, saw Day-Lewis give another incredible performance, perfectly playing the irritable, upper-class fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock. He is a mummy’s boy, still suffering from her death and looking for a replacement within the other female figures in his life. He meets Alma, a young waitress, and makes her his muse, but their relationship soon becomes incredibly toxic.
It seems as though Anderson and Day-Lewis’ partnership was an actor-director match made in heaven. Talking to Movies, the actor revealed the close kinship he feels with the filmmaker. “I’m separated from him by quite a number of years in age, by a vast ocean, an eight-hour time difference, a whole continent and yet when I met him, I felt like we’d grown up together and had we been brothers I dare say we would have strangled each other”, adding, “Isn’t that what brothers do?”
Talking about Day-Lewis making his final film appearance with Anderson, the director once joked to The Irish Times, “I know, I know. I know. I’ve killed off the world’s greatest actor.”
