Monday January 6, 2025 at 11:30 p.m., Arte dedicates a documentary to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. A look back at the extraordinary career of a man who is nothing like a Hollywood superstar and yet is a big name in cinema. For good reason, his very own playing technique…
He had everything to become the perfect English dandy. Daniel Day-Lewis was born in London, to a poet father and an actress mother, herself the daughter of a producer. However, if he appeared for the first time in the cinema in a small uncredited role in 1971, it was on the stage that he cut his teeth. Taking turns playing in Dracula, Romeo and Juliet et Hamleta piece that he left in full performance never to return. Returning to the cinema in 1982, he never left again, getting noticed in My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, then in My Left Foot in 1989. Monday January 6, 2025 at 11:30 p.m., Arte broadcasts Daniel Day-Lewis: the heira documentary which traces the life, journey and methods of an extraordinary actor.
Daniel Day-Lewis, a three-time Oscar-winning actor
The British actor is the winner of three Oscars. The first he received in 1990, when he was crowned best actor for My Left Foot. In this drama by Jim Sheridan, he plays Christy Brown, a paralyzed man confined to a chair, able only to use his left foot. “People are born into a trap, only the trap is not a wheelchair, but people’s perception”he confided about his role during an interview. And if Daniel Day-Lewis has assimilated this problem so well, which does not concern him, it is because he has given himself body and soul to his role. “To avoid the trap of appearances, Daniel Day-Lewis learns to tame his body. He spends months sitting on a wheelchair, requiring technicians to be hoisted onto the set and fed with a spoon. A capacity for immersion unusual for an English actor”explains the documentary. An extreme dedication that he applies to each of his shoots.
“She takes me to all kinds of strange places” : when Daniel Day-Lewis confided in his way of preparing a role
So, when he was chosen to lend his features to Nathanael Poe in The Last of the Mohicans in 1992, he decided to get his hands dirty again. In the Making-of of the film, released almost 10 years later, we can see him running through the woods, gun in hand, perfecting his hunting methods. “Daniel Day-Lewis does not need lines to play, he must live in the manner of. The Last of the Mohicans allows the actor to immerse himself even more deeply in his character. Alone in the forest, he learns to hunt like an Indian, to handle weapons, and only accepts to eat what he himself has killed.”. In the show Movies 101 in 2005, the actor declared: “I use my curiosity and it takes me to all kinds of strange places. I satisfy that curiosity as much as I can in my work. I do it for the simple reason that there are things that I I need to know and understand in order to be able to take on a role. A very special way of working which earned him two more Oscars: in 2008 for There Will Be Blood and in 2013 for Lincoln.
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