The great mutator

More than almost any other living actor, Day-Lewis has been able to escape the tarnishing effect of celebrity culture. He works rarely and speaks even less, appearing miraculously out of the collective memory to take on parts that it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing.

And then there’s the power of the transformation. “He doesn’t perform or act but mutates,” said Michael Mann, who directed him in The Last of the Mohicans.

The stories are legend of what Day-Lewis will do to fully inhabit his character. To play an Irish Republican Army partisan turned boxer in The Boxer, he trained twice a day, seven days a week, for three years. To play a crime kingpin in Gangs of New York, he practiced throwing deadly knives and reportedly glared so much at costar Leonardo DiCaprio he intimidated the young superstar.

“It’s a kind of a different level of focus than the normal person,” said director Jim Sheridan, who’s worked with Day-Lewis on several films, including My Left Foot.

Yet Sheridan stresses that Day-Lewis’ ferocious commitment is not an exercise in ego but in empathy. For instance, in In the Name of the Father, which was based on true events, Day-Lewis plays a man falsely imprisoned for an IRA bombing. One of the plot’s conundrums was why Day-Lewis’ character would sign a false confession.

“That seemed very hard to muddle through logically,” Sheridan said. But not after Day-Lewis stayed up two to three days in a row in a prison cell. “He was in a kind of emotional condition when we were doing the scene… He was close to tears because he was very tired. That answered all the questions of logic.”

In today’s film world, transformative acting is more often associated with women. The great chameleons of today are people like Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett. By contrast, the male stars, even great ones like Will Smith or Sean Penn, maintain some recognisable vestige of themselves from role to role.

But not Day-Lewis. He can truly mutate because of the unerring and thrilling control he maintains over his physical being. “He kind of works through the physical,” said Mann, so much so that it affects “all the complex circuitry in his wiring pattern” of his brain, which “starts to refract into your attitude.”

Whenever he was asked to describe his character’s driving impulse, Day-Lewis often used the metaphor of a man gripped by a fever. “The work becomes an end in itself,” he explained to one interviewer. “… if you compare that fever to the fever of prospecting, that those guys that thought they knew what they were after, which is the vast mansion on the Pacific Coast, by the time they had accumulated enough wealth to build that pyramid for themselves, the work was actually an end in itself. The fever was the thing that they lived for.”