Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis (born 29 April 1957) is an English actor with both British and Irish citizenship. He has twice won the Academy Award for Best Actor, for portraying Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989) and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007). He also won Best Actor awards from BAFTA and the Screen Actors' Guild for his role as Bill "The Butcher" Cutting in Gangs of New York (2002). He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his role as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), and is currently nominated for the Academy and BAFTA Award for Best Actor for the role.
Day-Lewis, who grew up in London, is the son of actress Jill Balcon and Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. Despite his training in the classical presentational acting style at the Bristol Old Vic, he is a method actor, known for his constant devotion to and research of his roles. Often, he will remain completely in character for the duration of the shooting schedule of his films, even to the point of adversely affecting his health. He is known as one of the most selective actors in the film industry, having starred in only six films since 1997, with as many as five years between roles.
Day-Lewis rarely talks publicly about his personal life. He had a relationship with French actress Isabelle Adjani, which lasted six years and eventually ended after a split and reconciliation. Their son Gabriel Day-Lewis was born in 1995 in New York, several months after the relationship between the two actors had ended. Gabriel now lives with him in New York, attending Elisabeth Irwin High School.
In 1996, while working on the film version of the stage-play The Crucible, he visited the home of playwright Arthur Miller where he was introduced to the writer's daughter, Rebecca Miller. They married later that year. The couple have two sons, Ronan Cal Day-Lewis (born 14 June 1998) and Cashel Blake Day-Lewis (born in May 2002) and divide their time between their homes in the U.S. and Ireland. Day-Lewis currently holds dual British and Irish citizenship; he became an Irish citizen in 1993. He is a supporter of south-east London football club Millwall F.C..On 15 July 2010, he received an honorary doctorate in letters from the University of Bristol, in part because of his attendance at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in his youth. Day-Lewis has stated that he had "no real religious education", and that he "suppose[s]" that he is a "die-hard agnostic".
In October 2012, he donated to Oxford University papers belonging to his father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, including early drafts of the poet's work as well as letters from actor John Gielgud and famous literary figures such as W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, and Philip Larkin.
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