Robin Hood’s Bay: The Yorkshire village that gave us an iconic Daniel Day-Lewis scene
If you turn away from the screen when watching the 1971 classic Sunday Bloody Sunday for a split second, you might miss the image of a young Daniel Day-Lewis playing a teenage vandal. Sporting a brown mop of hair and clad in denim, this marked the actor’s first-ever screen appearance, although it would take him a decade to score another film role, which came with Gandhi.
Day-Lewis predominantly starred in British films during the beginning of his career, including the gritty tale of queer love, My Beautiful Laundrette, and the period romance A Room With a View. By the time the 1990s rolled around, however, the actor found himself swept up in the fold of Hollywood, appearing in many epic historical tales or crime dramas. Having played everyone from American Rangers to Abraham Lincoln, he’s never exactly shied away from a part far-removed from himself.
Yet, when the actor was set to retire (that’s until he recently re-emerged in the spotlight for his son Ronan’s directorial debut, Anemone), he picked out a role a lot closer to home. Born in London himself, it seemed only fitting that his supposed last role would see him play an uptight Englishman in Phantom Thread. No American accent, no big Hollywood studio settings. Instead, production of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film moved between various locations in England, particularly North Yorkshire.
You don’t really associate somewhere like North Yorkshire with cinema; it’s all windy moors, small towns, seaside locations, and breathtakingly old buildings. If anything, it’s a landscape you’d associate with folk horror or Brontë-esque period dramas, not a Daniel Day-Lewis film.
When it came to filming Phantom Thread, however, California-born Anderson and his crew set up their cameras in various Yorkshire villages to capture an authentic image of Day-Lewis’ character Woodcock taking time off in the countryside, and you get a proper glimpse at some beautiful locations that are rarely shown on the big screen.
I’d argue that the most iconic scene in the film is the one in which Woodcock meets Alma for the first time. After his sister encourages the dressmaker to take a break, he visits his country home and stops off for food, where he happens to meet the young waitress. He orders a ridiculously long and extravagant breakfast, almost as a test for her, and soon the pair become romantically involved.
This scene takes place at the Victoria Hotel in Robin Hood’s Bay, a small village not far from Whitby, with a gorgeous, cobbled, hilly street running through it. With fish and chip shops, independent shops, and plenty of gorgeous houses, it’s a proper tourist destination in the summer – so picturesque and close to the sea – but in Phantom Thread, we’re taken back in time to a much quieter vision of the place.
The Victoria Hotel sits right at the top of the hill by the main car park, and if you get your bearings right while you’re inside the restaurant, you can sit in the exact spot where Woodcock and Alma first meet – it’s the very spot that he orders his feast, by a window with a view that overlooks the sea.
You can briefly see a few other North Yorkshire locations in the film, too, like Staithes, a gorgeous fishing village, and Lythe. But it’s this scene in Robin Hood’s Bay that stands as an unforgettable Day-Lewis moment. He’s sincere, but there’s this undercurrent of humour, and the initial attraction between the two – and the strange impending dynamic between them – blossoms with every sentence spoken. Who would’ve thought that such an important scene in Day-Lewis’s (supposedly) final film would’ve been filmed in a hotel near Whitby?
