丹尼尔戴刘易斯吧 关注：662贴子：7,477
People Interview - 1988
by: David Hutchings
Sizzling Movie Lover
They say Daniel Day-Lewis can play anything, but few who have seen him onscreen would ever have expected him to become a sex symbol. In 1986 the 30-year-old Britisher gave smashing back-to-back performances as a gay street punk in My Beautiful Laundrette and as a Victorian prig in A Room With a View, earning critical hurrahs and a Best Supporting Actor award from the New York Film Critics. Good parts to display an actor's range, but not the kind to incite fans into pasting his photo on their bedroom walls. It took his latest role, as the lecherous Czech surgeon in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on Milan Kundera's acclaimed 1984 novel, to do that. Day-Lewis' performance as a man who chooses the "heaviness" of commitment over the "lightness" of freedom is the surprise of the year.
"Take off your clothes," Day-Lewis seductively orders each new conquest in the film. They readily comply. "I've heard women even find the back of his neck sexy," says director Philip Kaufman. Raves one magazine: he "performs as if his hormones were on fire."
Just now, parking his borrowed Harley-Davidson in the garage of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Day-Lewis' flame seems to have dimmed a bit. "I've got a bit of the lurgy," he apologizes, muffling his sneeze in a handkerchief. And though he looks dashing on his bike, he might have done his health a favor by taking a taxi. Not a bit, says Day-Lewis. "I like to ride in the wind to the ocean," he says, "to feel the power kept locked in but ready to go if needed."
Hmmm. Maybe the serious actor has got the hang of this hunk stuff, after all. His outfit is exactly right: tattered jeans, old boots held together by tape, a faded bandanna around his neck. But the look doesn't go with his upperclass accent or unassuming manner. He is mortified about shedding his clothes onscreen ("The idea of all those people seeing me nude!"), shocked that people identify him with his character ("I didn't go around bedding chambermaids") and disquieted that the press would ask for details of his reported affair with Juliette Binoche, the French beauty who plays his wife in the film. "Of course she is special to me," he allows, as if conceding the greatest intimacy.
There you have it. His secret is out. Daniel Day-Lewis is a gentleman. Not only that, but to the manner born as the son of the late C. Day-Lewis, poet laureate of England, and actress Jill Balcon, whose father, Sir Michael Balcon, produced the early Hitchcock films. Daniel and his sister, Tamasin, 34, a BBC producer-director, were reared in a large Georgian house in London. Since Daniel's father, a class-conscious Socialist, didn't want his son to have an elitist education, the boy was enrolled in a state school he called "the local flea pit. I adored it."
This experiment in egalitarianism ended when Daniel was 11. He was packed off to an all-male boarding school, which made him feel scholastically inferior. "I started fighting, drinking, smoking, even shoplifting. I broke things to get attention." He found some solace when he began acting in school plays, which led to parts with London's National Youth Theatre.
When Daniel was 15 and in the middle of his rebellious years, his father died of cancer. "It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile," Daniel says. "He was constantly having to make excuses for me. I loved him and miss him very much."
McGuigan adds: "The guy has a tasty left hook - and his right isn't too bad either. I retired years ago but let me tell you Daniel did his best to retire me again.
"He took some good punches from me and even though he ended up with a bloodied nose, fat lips and black eyes he never once went down."
Day Lewis, 40, was so obsessive about his training he insisted McGuigan put him in the ring against some current top boxers.
"I was worried at first, but in the end I put him in with some of the best fighters in his division, like British champion Geoff McCreash and Clayton Stewart, who co-stars in the movie," says McGuigan.
"They all said he was a tough customer - and these aren't the kind of guys who'd say that just to be nice...they meant it."
Day Lewis, who plays a former IRA convict trying to resume his boxing career after release from prison in The Boxer, even took McGuigan to one side and confessed his real ambition in life - to be a real-life professional fighter.
And McGuigan says: "He easily could be. Then again he's not doing too badly as a movie star, is he?"
When I'm calling you-oo-oo-oo
Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe turn "The Last of the Mohicans" into a deliciously roasted chestnut.
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By Charles Taylor
May 10, 1999 | Old Hollywood meets new Hollywood in Michael Mann's 1992 version of "The Last of the Mohicans." Based on both James Fenimore Cooper's novel and the screenplay for the 1936 film version (starring Randolph Scott as Cooper's noble savage Hawkeye) the movie is recognizably, even reassuringly, old-fashioned. Mann provides emotions in big, readily identifiable slabs -- heroism, cowardice, loyalty, revenge, love -- and assigns them to his characters as if he were handing out charades instructions. But Mann also employs an MTV slickness that's pure '90s. He conceives of the story as if it were a gigantic piece of mood music. The look of the movie's ravishing landscapes (shot by Dante Spinotti, with the forests of North Carolina and Pennsylvania standing in for New York state circa 1757) and the faces of the movie's ravishing actors (Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe) carry as much emotion as the story does. And Mann slathers Trevor Jones' score -- a synthesized, symphonic wash -- over everything. When Stowe's Cora swoons against Day-Lewis' Hawkeye in a besieged fort as the night sky glows with the fires of combat behind them and Jones' syrup swells on the soundtrack, you can giggle or you can surrender to the very real charisma of the two stars. Probably you'll do both. "The Last of the Mohicans" is a striking mixture of the ersatz and the genuine. In other words, it's vintage Hollywood. It's also a smashingly entertaining and satisfying film.
The Last of the Mohicans
Directed by Michael Mann
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Jodhi May and Wes Studi
In his other movies, Mann's specialty has been a chic, chilly existential pulp angst that's as simplistic and inflated as his titles -- "Thief," "Manhunter," "Heat." But the adventure-book tone of "The Last of the Mohicans," which is set during the war between England and France for control of the American colonies, clears away all of the director's phony torment. "The Last of the Mohicans" makes you understand why adventure stories were once called romances. It's a date movie in the guise of an action movie. Hawkeye and Cora are like a colonial Tarzan and Jane: She's the white woman who ventures into the wilderness only to be saved by the European who has learned the ways of the natives, and with whom she finds love. That's a female fantasy perhaps even more than a male one. This noble wild man brings out the woman's passionate nature which has no outlet in the corsetted society she comes from. One look at Cora's priggish suitor (Steven Waddington, with his piggy snout), a Redcoat officer given to homilies about how respect and friendship are the basis for a successful union, and civilization doesn't seem like such a hot idea. The way Mann brings together Hawkeye and Cora after he rescues Cora from a band of marauding Hurons shows a witty grasp of movie glamor: You can tell they're a love match by the way Stowe's unpinned tresses match up with Day-Lewis'. Later the pair take temporary refuge in a cave behind a cascading waterfall, the torrents of water standing in for the lovers' emotions. This natural wonder seems to exist to provide a showcase for the stars' sexiness.
Mann shortchanges Stowe and Day-Lewis by allowing his atmospherics to do too much of the work, but romantic roles like these can get down to an actor's essence in ways that more complex parts can't. Stowe has never become as big a star as she should have. Cora is the definitive combination of Stowe's delicate, cameo-like beauty and her unflinching gutsiness. When Cora has to shoot a charging Indian, it's only the expression in Stowe's eyes that's tremulous; physically she's rock steady. Day-Lewis has some fine, subtle moments, as when he allows a ghost of a sardonic smirk to play around his mouth while listening to some idiocy from the British officers, but the heart of his performance is the deadly grace with which he jumps and whirls around as he dispatches opponents in the (breathlessly exciting) battle scenes, or the way he appears to have concentrated every ounce of his being as he runs through the woods. Day-Lewis never seems ridiculous in his long hair and buckskins, never seems to be slumming in this action role because the physicality of his performances has always been on a heroic scale. Like Olivier, he's one of those rare actors who can play a hero without having to resort to parody or apology.
Reducing Fenimore Cooper's turgid novel to a tale of big primal emotions gives the story more immediacy and passion than it ever had. Mann's conception doesn't allow for the lightly self-mocking humor of a swashbuckler. But his willingness to present the derring-do of adventure movies straight gives the picture the sweep and color of legend, as in the moment when the approach of a Huron war party is symbolized by the blurred glow of their torches passing beneath a waterfall.
There is one element that Mann's storybook romance can't contain, and that's Jodhi May's performance as Cora's younger sister Alice. May (she also played Barbara Hershey's daughter in "A World Apart") has almost no lines; possessing a face worthy of silent film, she doesn't need them. Alice spends much of the movie watching in paralyzed fear as her adventure into the colony outposts turns into a nightmare. May plays these scenes almost stock still, unblinking, as if Alice had turned into a movie camera as the images she sees are burned into her brain. With each new horror (which we see as she does, lightning fast and lingering at the same time), you sense Alice retreating further and further from the reality of what's before her. But she returns to possession of herself in a scene that both embraces and explodes Cooper's vision of the character as the pious young woman who will do anything to keep her virtue. May is terrifying in this moment, drawing out the seconds before Alice makes her final choice until they feel like an eternity. May turns the scene into Alice's revenge, payback for every atrocity her young eyes have been made to see, a promise to haunt the dreams of her tormentors. The scene cracks the movie open. Stowe and Day-Lewis may be its heroic/romantic soul. May is its avenging angel.
salon.com | May 10, 1999
Daniel Day-Lewis is the antitesis of the attention-seeking Hollywood actor who basks in fame and laps up the trappings of success. This intense Irishman has shunned the limelight to such a degree that he's retired from movies twice - once training to be a cobbler in Florence - and has spent much of the last few years holed up in a rural Irish retreat.
Jim Sheridan, producer of The Boxer and In The Name Of The Father, says "He's already saying this is his last mvoie. That's what he tells me and I believe him." If this is the case - though it has been rumored he's signed up to do another film called In The Heart Of The Sea - it will come as no huge surprise to Daniel's fans. His profile has dropped dramatically since the late 80's and early 90's. Despite winning an Oscar for My Left Foot and receiving rave reviews for most of his screen performances, he has taken on fewer and fewer roles, and his lifestyle and looks have become more unusual by the year.
Judging by the photographs, the 43-year old actor, pictured with a mystery brunette in a Roman cafe, has decided to keep the droopy handle-bar moustache that he cultivated for his role in Gangs Of New York. Coupled with crumpled, peasant-style clothes, and his long, silver-grey hair tucked into a cap, Daniel lloks quite eccentric - far removed from his heart-throb image of old.
But, if Gangs Of New York is Daniel's swan-song, he's sure to go out with a bang. THe movie, set in the mid-1800's, is a Martin Scorcese epic and tipped to be a huge box office hit to rival Gladiator when it's released later this year. Daniel plays a gang leader, Bill "The Butcher" Poole, who likes nothing better than to hack people to death. His co-stars include Hollywood heavyweights Leonardo DiCaprio, Liam Neeson and Cameron Diaz.
One of Daniel's peculiarities is his meticulous commitment to "method acting". Many other actors would improvise the act of cutting meat, but Daniel undertook a training course on how to cut up meat in a top-notch London butchers, W. Head & Co.
Similarly, when he starred in the 1997 film, The Boxer, he trained to fight at a gym in Lambeth Road, East London, and achieved professional standard.
For his Oscar-winning performance as the quadriplegic Christy Brown in My Left Foot, he took to a wheelchair for weeks and for the Last Of The Mohicans in 1992, he undertook some serious body building to acquire rippling muscles.
Daniel has always shied away from the mainstream, blockbuster-style movies, preferring more arty productions. As the son of former Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and grandson of Sir Michael Balcon, former head of Ealing Studios, it was perhaps inevitable he would choose such roles.
Daniel studied acting at the highly-respected Bristol Old Vic School, and shot to fame in the controversial movie My Beautiful Launderette in 1985, which featured gay relationships. In 1986 came A Room With A View adapted from the novel by EM Forster, then the intellectual The Unbearable Lightness Of Being in 1988. The pressures of his career have taken a toll over the years, and he's admitted he's not the most straightfoward man, once saying of acting: "if I weren't allowed this outlet, there wouldn't be a place for me in society." On another occasion he said: "I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else."
His last theatre role was an adaption of Hamlet at London's National Theatre, but Daniel was forced to quit the show before the run came to an end due to "exhaustion." Whether the dark and difficult role caused him to have a nervous breakdown or not, Daniel has never again returned to the stage.
And that was the last we heard of Day-Lewis. It is not surprising that this actor, who is most known for completely immersing himself in a role, would need some recovery time between pictures. Indeed, Day-Lewis will return to the big screen later this year, reteaming with his The Age of Innocence director Martin Scorsese for Gangs of New York. But Day-Lewis will not be the star of that film, instead supporting Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz in the story set in mid-1800s New York. It will tell the story of the violent conflicts that arose between New York natives and Italian immigrants moving into the city.
Day-Lewis and actress Isabelle Adjani were involved from 1989-1994 and have a son together, Gabriel-Kane. In 1996 he married actress Rebecca Miller, a supporting player in such films as 1994's Love Affair and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. They also have a son together, born in 1998.
