The controversial Oscar-winning movie Daniel Day-Lewis refused to star in
Retirement doesn’t mean the same in acting as it does in most other walks of life, so if anything, there was a sense of inevitability that Daniel Day-Lewis would end his self-imposed exile from cinema and make a comeback.
He’s got previous experience doing that sort of thing anyway, having first turned his back on the performing arts after wrapping production on The Boxer. He separated himself from the industry entirely, retreated to Florence to make shoes, and didn’t appear onscreen for half a decade until Martin Scorsese coaxed him back into the fold by dangling Gangs of New York in front of him.
Even when Day-Lewis announced his retirement in the aftermath of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, many within the business hoped it wouldn’t be permanent. As it turned out, nepotism is difficult to resist, with the actor making his return in son Ronan’s feature-length directorial debut Anemone, which he co-wrote with his old man.
The point is, there were five years between The Boxer and Gangs of New York, and it was another three after Scorsese’s historical epic that Day-Lewis took a role, which saw him being directed by his wife Rebecca Miller in The Ballad of Jack and Rose. He only made four more films in the 12 years that followed, so he’s well-known as a thespian who won’t commit to a project unless he feels he can’t turn it down.
Funnily enough, one of the most contentious Academy Award-winning movies in history wasn’t one of those projects, and Day-Lewis’ disinterest even had a knock-on effect. In early 1991, Glory‘s Edward Zwick was announced to be directing the period-set romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love, with Julia Roberts locked in to play the part of Viola de Lesseps.
However, the freshly-minted A-lister who was soaring off the back of Pretty Woman‘s success had one ironclad demand that needed to be met if she were to commit: Day-Lewis had to be cast as ‘The Bard’. If he wasn’t, then she wouldn’t make the movie, which placed the studio at an impasse. The least they could do was put out an offer, but frothy romance was never really his thing.
Sure enough, Day-Lewis refused to sign on the dotted line, and after Roberts made a fruitless attempt to persuade him otherwise, she pulled herself out of the running six weeks before principal photography was due to start. It would be another seven years before Shakespeare in Love finally got in front of cameras, and its lasting legacy is that of arguably the least-deserving ‘Best Picture’ winner ever.
Nobody can say with a straight face that it deserved to emerge victorious over Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, but if it had been Roberts, Day-Lewis, and Zwick leading the charge instead of Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, and John Madden, then it could have been a completely different story.
