21. Stars and Bars (1988)
Perhaps keen not to be pigeonholed in high-fibre roles, Daniel Day-Lewis took on a pair of zany culture-clash comedies (the other was Eversmile, New Jersey) that featured him singing in a bubble bath. In Stars and Bars, he is a prim English art expert who travels to the American south to retrieve a Renoir from its owner (Harry Dean Stanton) and butts heads with various irksome oddballs. Playing the sort of nitwit that would become Hugh Grant’s meal-ticket, Day-Lewis proves that wackiness is not in his wheelhouse.
20. Nine (2009)
The movie of the Broadway musical of Fellini’s 8½ is one of only two duds on the Day-Lewis CV. Surrounded by dazzling female actors (Nicole Kidman, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren), he ends up making heavy weather of Guido, the bewildered auteur caught at a creative impasse. A light touch eludes him: he’s no Marcello Mastroianni, that’s for sure.
19. Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)
John Schlesinger’s bisexual love-triangle drama gave Day-Lewis his film debut at the age of 14. He is briefly shown sauntering along a row of parked cars, scratching the paintwork with a broken bottle. The delinquent behaviour, the insouciant look, the south London setting: this could be a teenage snapshot of Johnny from My Beautiful Laundrette.
18. Nanou (1986)
Ten minutes or so of screen time doesn’t give Day-Lewis much chance to make an impression as the debonair ex of young Nanou (Imogen Stubbs). He finds her in France, where she has fallen in with a would-be terrorist, but says “au revoir” shortly after. Still, he looks Delon-level dashing in a raincoat.
17. Gandhi (1982)
Like Sunday Bloody Sunday, another hooligan cameo for Day-Lewis. He gets dialogue this time, all of it racist, as he tries to intimidate the young Gandhi, played by Ben Kingsley. Movies in which Day-Lewis played a more prominent role have attracted no shortage of Oscar nominations, but Gandhi is the only one of his to have walked off with the best picture prize.
16. The Bounty (1984)
Pauline Kael was one of Day-Lewis’s early champions but she argued that he “stuck out” and “seemed like a bad actor” in this version of Mutiny on the Bounty. In his big scene, he is furiously reprimanded by Anthony Hopkins as Captain Bligh. Equally noteworthy is the sight of Day-Lewis sharing the screen for the first time with one of his own acting heroes, Phil Davis. Also among the Bounty’s crew is the comic John Sessions: in Gangs of New York, Sessions would play an actor playing Abraham Lincoln, and getting harangued and pelted for his troubles by Day-Lewis.
15. Eversmile, New Jersey (1989)
In his second stab at fish-out-of-water comedy, Day-Lewis is an over-zealous Irish travelling dentist given to philosophical musings (“Did we somehow mislay our genetic memory or did God just forget to give us better teeth?”) as he brings good brushing technique to Argentina courtesy of the DuBois Foundation for the Development of Dental Consciousness. Tending to priests, peasants and gangsters alike, he roams the land on his motorcycle and sidecar, gets chased by multiple Santa Clauses, falls for a woman on the run from her wedding, and finally declares: “The world is collapsing! And I have an erection!”
14. The Crucible (1996)
Put Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder together on screen and it never works out well for their characters (see also: The Age of Innocence). In Arthur Miller’s by-the-book adaptation of his own ageless play about the Salem witch trials, Day-Lewis is the farmer John Proctor, who pays a heavy price for dallying with young Abigail (Ryder). It was through the making of the film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, that Day-Lewis first met Miller’s daughter, Rebecca, whom he married at the end of 1996, and with whom he had two of his three children, including Ronan, co-writer and director of Anemone.
13. The Boxer (1997)
Training under Barry McGuigan, Day-Lewis boxed twice a day, seven days a week, for nearly three years to prepare to play the IRA soldier who embraces his pugilist roots after serving 14 years in prison. More inflammatory is his rekindled romance with his teenage sweetheart, who happens to be another prisoner’s wife, played by Emily Watson. In his third film for Jim Sheridan, Day-Lewis gives a hushed, coiled performance (he doesn’t lose his rag until the 85-minute mark). It heralded his first retirement – after this, he didn’t make another film for five years – but is not exactly what you’d call going out on a high.
12. A Room with a View (1985)
Central to the rise of Day-Lewis was the timing of this Merchant-Ivory adaptation of EM Forster’s novel, which opened immediately after My Beautiful Laundrette. Hard to imagine a better illustration of his range than the back-to-back sight of the sensually swaggering Johnny in Laundrette and the uptight prig Cecil Vyse in Room. The moment when jilted Cecil stands with his shoe in his hand was all Day-Lewis’s idea. “If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you’re vulnerable,” he said, “you’ll feel 10 times more vulnerable.” Spoken like the shoemaker he would eventually become during his first retirement.
11. In the Name of the Father (1993)
As Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for the 1974 IRA pub bombing, Day-Lewis goes from impish troublemaker to broken wreck and finally folk hero. Terrific to see him sharing the screen again with Phil Davis: this time, Davis is a brute putting the screws on him in the interrogation room. And the scene in which Gerry brutally castigates his father, Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite), when the two of them are cooped up together in the same cell, remains blistering. Ultimately, this is a moral work rather than a cinematic one, and there is nothing much for Day-Lewis to play in the final hour but righteousness.
10. Phantom Thread (2017)
Less a coherent movie than a string of eye-catching confrontations, Day-Lewis’s second collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson – and the catalyst for his second retirement – casts him as Reynolds Woodcock, a fastidious and imperious 1950s dressmaker. Fun though the standoffs are, especially Reynolds’s hilariously disproportionate hissy fit after his asparagus is cooked in butter rather than oil and salt, the movie is little more than an arthouse Devil Wears Prada, with Day-Lewis in Meryl Streep mode and everyone else (bar Lesley Manville, superb as his indomitable sister) running scared.
9. Lincoln (2012)
Day-Lewis won his third best actor Oscar for a mesmerising performance as the president trying to pass the 13th amendment, which outlawed slavery, as the civil war rages. Under Steven Spielberg’s direction, he brings a lolling looseness to lines that sound as if they’ve only just occurred to him. A simple scene depicting Lincoln meeting wounded soldiers in hospital is rendered moving by the actor’s unforced affability, his warming burr. His charisma makes you understand why the soldiers would get a kick simply from standing in his shadow.
8. The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)
Nothing to do with Titanic, the Jack and Rose here are a father and daughter, played by Day-Lewis and Camilla Belle respectively, whose off-the-grid lifestyle is jeopardised when Jack’s girlfriend (Catherine Keener) comes to stay, bringing her teenage sons (Paul Dano and Ryan McDonald). Under the direction of his wife, the novelist and film-maker Rebecca Miller, Day-Lewis exudes grumpy charm as the Scottish immigrant whose love for his daughter grows gradually suffocating and even unsavoury. Two years before he and Day-Lewis locked horns spectacularly on screen in There Will Be Blood, Dano comes off badly in their fracas in a treehouse. It was Dano’s fine work here that prompted the senior actor to recommend him to Paul Thomas Anderson for that movie.
7. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
Philip Kaufman’s ambitious film of Milan Kundera’s novel about the Prague Spring contains a lead performance for which Day-Lewis has expressed regret. Though the script was in English, he learned Czech but still found himself out of his depth as the priapic brain surgeon Tomas: “It was something to do with language. The idea of speaking English with a Czech accent meant it wasn’t coming from anywhere.” Accept that touch of inauthenticity and it’s still possible to savour Day-Lewis’s wry, carnivorous sexual magnetism, and the pitiful sight of Tomas’s spirit being crushed by the political regime and the betrayals it demands. Other pluses: that mane of liquorice-coloured hair, and the actor’s tingling rapport with Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin.
6. Gangs of New York (2002)
It was Leonardo DiCaprio who coaxed Day-Lewis out of his first retirement during a stroll in Central Park. The young star’s reward? To be comprehensively acted off the screen. As bullyboy William Cutting, aka Bill the Butcher, Day-Lewis isn’t merely the dominant presence in Martin Scorsese’s misshapen, mid-19th-century gangster thriller: he is its sole source of dynamism. In stove-pipe hat, flapping trenchcoat and with an American eagle printed on his glass eye, he looks like the Babadook’s sleazy uncle, giving off strong proto-Trumpian energy as he decries “the foreign hordes defiling” his land. There’s also a nice Day-Lewis Cinematic Universe crossover when he strides through a crowd of anti-Lincoln protesters and lobs a knife that hits a portrait of the president he would portray a decade later. He also gets to describe Ireland, his real-life off-screen love, as “an excrementous isle”.
5. The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
The method actor as matinee idol. Even those who haven’t seen Michael Mann’s stylish, swoon-worthy take on the James Fenimore Cooper novel will know the lengths to which Day-Lewis went to portray Hawkeye, adoptive son of a Mohican chief. He lived wild for weeks, ate only what he could hunt or forage, learned to load a rifle while running through the forest and built his own canoe. The North Carolina landscapes are ravishing, though they risk being upstaged by the magnificence of the actor’s mighty brow and glossy tresses as he darts among the trees in slow-mo. Then there is that emphatic demand to Madeleine Stowe: “Stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you!” Who could possibly disobey?
4. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi saw the influence of Clint Eastwood on Day-Lewis’s minimalist performance as Johnny, the gay former thug who helps spruce up a London launderette. Director Stephen Frears thought he was more like Marlene Dietrich. The actor described it as “the first film that I ever passionately wanted to do”. Hence the letter he wrote to Frears (“I know you think I come from a public-school background but I’ve got very nasty friends”) in which he threatened to break the director’s legs if he didn’t give him the part. It worked. As did his brooding, funny, horny performance. A star was born right there among the suds.
3. The Age of Innocence (1993)
The critic Jonathan Romney floated the theory that Newland Archer, the elegant lawyer played by Day-Lewis in Martin Scorsese’s rapturous adaptation of Edith Wharton’s study of late-19th century New York mores, was a “soul brother” to Jake La Motta in Raging Bull: “He simply wears fancier gloves.” There is certainly a seam of cunning and coldness in Day-Lewis’s performance, but there is boyish wonder too, especially in the gasping, enchanted laugh he lets slip whenever Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) does something irreverent or iconoclastic. As Archer tries to expedite his marriage to her cousin May (Winona Ryder) in an attempt to quell his feelings for the countess, Day-Lewis strikes and sustains a note of tortured panache.
2. My Left Foot (1989)
Two contradictory things are true of Jim Sheridan’s film about the artist and writer Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy. One: there is no excuse for a disabled actor not to have been cast in the role. And two: Day-Lewis – who won his first Oscar for this – is astonishing in it. The first of three projects with Sheridan, this marked the beginnings of the Daniel Day-Loopy PR machine, as stories abounded of the lengths to which he went to stay authentically in character: never leaving his wheelchair, having to be carried over the cables on set, contorting his body so fiercely that he broke two ribs during filming. The movie hasn’t endured as well as it might: it ends on a happy-ever-after with Brown’s future-wife Mary Carr, who, it was later alleged by his biographer Georgia Louise Hambleton, isolated and abused him.
1. There Will Be Blood (2007)
The comedian Adam Riches once called Day-Lewis “the greatest actor never to appear in anyone’s favourite film”. Paul Thomas Anderson’s awe-inspiring character-study-disguised-as-an-epic gives the lie to that quip. Speaking in the corroded rumble of John Huston’s Noah Cross from Chinatown (another monstrous devourer of people and land alike), Day-Lewis is extraordinary as Daniel Plainview, a rapacious early-20th century Californian oil prospector. In a performance that can be summed up as long overcast periods interrupted by all hell breaking loose, usually with Paul Dano on the receiving end as the pipsqueak preacher who is Plainview’s sole adversary, Day-Lewis doesn’t make us like Plainview or even understand his cruelty, but we absolutely believe in him. And, as with all great monster movies, we are eager to see what he breaks next. After nearly three hours in his company, audiences are likely to develop a severe case of Stockholm syndrome.
