回复：【资料】丹尼尔的英文文章

After 1997’s “The Boxer,” Day-Lewis stopped making movies. The actor, who previously had had a son with Isabelle Adjani, had married Rebecca Miller, author of the book of stories “Personal Velocity,” director of the raw, deeply affecting new film of the same name and daughter of playwright Arthur Miller. (“When I got married,” Day-Lewis says, “someone made the scurrilous suggestion in one of those rags that I was somehow marrying Rebecca’s dad.” Rebecca’s prettier, I say. “Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to share a bed with Arthur—not every night, anyway.”) For years, he and Miller—who now have two boys—did the shocking, non-Hollywood thing of just living their lives. Day-Lewis even spent a year apprenticed to a shoemaker whom Scorsese refers to as “one of the masters of Florence.” Day-Lewis will not discuss shoemaking, but he doesn’t really need to explain. This is someone, remember, who is obsessed with digging into other lives—and who’d considered a career as a cabinetmaker. “Exactly, exactly,” says Scorsese. “It gives you a certain satisfaction and sense of completion to create something like that.” Day-Lewis has said that he’s still trying to figure out if making movies actually means anything—but that just seems like a polite way of saying he already has.

EILEEN: The thing that everyone wants to know about actors is what their real hair looks like. I almost laughed when you came to the door because your shaved head is like a punch line, a kind of "fuck you."
DANIEL: For years I just left my hair alone. That way, I knew I'd at least have enough for what was needed when I went to work. [laughs] So this must be a "fuck you." Certainly, it happened the moment we finished shooting in Rome. I had quite a lot of hair and I was glad to just get rid of it.
EILEEN: Were you shooting part of Gangs of New York there?
DANIEL: We shot the whole thing at Cinecittý.
EILEEN: How was that?
DANIEL: There was a kind of magnificent irrelevancy to what we were doing. We were trying to inhabit a different world and a different place. There's no correlation between modern Rome and the Five Points neighborhood of New York. Also in Rome, you're surrounded by distractions. So much of your energy goes into ignoring the stuff that you don't need to see.

EILEEN: For whom do you do the work?
DANIEL: It was never a selfless thing, and it still isn't. I'm not sure that it could be. People say, "Oh, you haven't worked for a while, don't you owe it to . . . " [laughs] I realized quite early on that this slow-burning revolution — this compulsion — was not endlessly replenishing. You have to recognize it when it's there and leave it well alone when it isn't. That idea goes against everything that happens when you start to get work. They fling it at you and it's tempting — you never know when the next thing is going to happen, and I didn't.
EILEEN: Was that intimidating?
DANIEL: I had some breaks early on. When a lot of my contemporaries came out of college they were stopped in their tracks, they couldn't get a bite anywhere. That was waiting for me further down the road. It was quite shocking, just sitting around thinking, "What am I now? I'm apparently useless to everybody."
EILEEN: Is it because you weren't getting a bite, or a bite you wanted?
DANIEL: Both. I had been lured into doing a job that I was of two minds about, and it was disastrous. Not the result, but the feeling that it left me with. I felt so demeaned in some way. Maybe it's just because I'm very lazy, but I started to take long periods between things.
EILEEN: In some weird way, the spaces between the work are what's really interesting.
DANIEL: Definitely. That's obscured when you're young because your drive is always leading you from one place to another. It's the resting places or the periods of lying fallow where you do the real work.

EILEEN: The thing that's scary about not doing anything, or not doing what people are inviting you to do, is you feel like you are facing death in a way.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think you're right. It's a little death and you have lots of little practices. How do you work?
EILEEN: I started writing poems in my twenties. It got to be how I made a map of the world. That's always happening, though it does stop sometimes. I started writing fiction slowly in my thirties, then that became novels. Making a living as a poet is a huge trick, so I stumbled into performance and teaching, writing about art. I'll be very, very busy, but at the end of the year, I'll think, "What did I do this year?"
DANIEL: There's so much movement, especially in this country. People are traveling everywhere all the time, very much locked into the road that they're on. We've been living in Connecticut for the last few months where there is a stillness that really appeals to me. It's the same in Ireland. It's not uncommon for actors to be strangely antisocial. A lot of actors that I've worked with seem to feverishly enter into society for a time, and then they retreat. I feel in my guts that I have to get away from all that frenzy.
EILEEN: As an actor, you're basically agreeing to do something that is very mute in a certain way. It's already been determined what you say and where you walk, yet you have to make that come alive.
DANIEL: That's the discipline within which you struggle, and if you're lucky, find your own freedom. That's the game, and it's won long before you ever come face to face with a camera.

EILEEN: Do you mean the preparation time before filming?
DANIEL: In those quiet months before you approach the dreaded beast, you begin to enter into a world that isn't yours. People are always reading some sort of craziness into that, but it seems logical to me. You just start taking steps towards that other life. Of course, you never entirely give over your own life or your own self. You never relinquish everything, rather, there's an exchange that takes place at certain moments. You don't know how it happens, or where. But you think you've traveled a vast distance — you felt that you were living in another place. That's where the joy of it is.
EILEEN: That's wild. I like how you talk about the scale of it.
DANIEL: Because acting is such a strange thing to do, most people find it reassuring to imagine that you can just switch it off or switch it on. "One minute he was just joking around, the next minute, wow, he was somebody else." Some people can do that. Maybe they've done all the interior work and they're confident that they can make the transition in an instant. I take my hat off to them, but that seems strange to me.
EILEEN: Frightening, in fact.
DANIEL: Yet most people appear even more intimidated by the notion that you might actually want to stay in that other world once you find it, even if it's painful and intimidating. You might just want to stay in there for a while and see what happens.

EILEEN: I'm thinking that performance is a weird combination of being very vulnerable and very powerful. There were a lot of poet memorials at the height of the AIDS thing. We would all get up and read our friend's work. It was amazing because it was like putting on the bear's cloak and doing a dance. You knew the guy, you listened to him, you hung out with him, you heard him read his poems all the time, and then when you got up there, you realized you were trying to put the guy's body on, and it was very awkward.
DANIEL: I used to go to quite a lot of poetry readings but I haven't been for a long time. When I was a kid I really enjoyed them. We saw more poets at that time, when my dad was alive. There would always be someone in and out of the house. Philip Larkin, a guy called George Macbeth. I read the piece you wrote about Jimmy Schuyler in index — about the reading he gave. I enjoyed that.
EILEEN: Thank you. That was one of the most incredible readings I've ever been to. Jimmy was a great poet. Now, your dad was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain.
DANIEL: He was a very sweet man. He had been smothered by his own dad, so he felt he had to give his children a little more space than they wanted. I don't want my kids to have to miss me the way I miss my dad — the way you miss a person who was not really there.
EILEEN: Yeats famously ignored his own kids when he saw them on the street. Was your dad busy or not there?
DANIEL: He was there, and he was preoccupied. The gist of it is that I didn't discover him, and I miss not having had that chance.

EILEEN: Do you read any poetry? What are you reading now?
DANIEL: I'm reading a book about the relationship between Matisse and Picasso at the moment. It's part interesting and part not so interesting. I'm reading very slowly — not devouring it like I would when I'm really onto something.
EILEEN: Are you dogged?
DANIEL: I am dogged but I kind of hate being that way. You should be really into a book, and read something else if it's not working. But I come back to it, page after page.
EILEEN: My girlfriend's name is Jordana. She just dives right in and find what she wants. I'm like, "How can you do that?" I can't even skim a paper. I really am very nervous about the Sunday Times.
DANIEL: [laughs] You don't want to get into it — it's like a tunnel.
EILEEN: A tunnel of rage and irritation.
DANIEL: I was glad when somebody called recently and wanted advice about a poem. I hadn't read any poetry for a while, so I started looking through a few volumes to find something, and that was really nice. When you pick up a volume of poetry, you can feel the weight of it. It has to be an act of will for me to start, but when I do I'm always so grateful.
EILEEN: Do you believe in god?
DANIEL: I'm still not sure. I suppose I'm a die-hard agnostic. I don't know. Do you?
EILEEN: I think I do, because I like the feeling of saying so. I grew up very educated to believe — Catholic School and all that. I bumped up against religion again some years later, and took it on when I would take anything on. Then I just started to think, "Maybe I do believe." I like praying.
DANIEL: I never took the habit.

Jill Balcon: A life less ordinaryThe actress Jill Balcon was the daughter of a movie mogul and the wife of a poet laureate. Now she is about to play the lover of her son, Daniel Day-LewisBy Matthew Sweet
26 September 2003

One afternoon in the mid-1960s, Tamasin and Daniel Day-Lewis came haring down from their playroom to tell their mother about something they'd just seen on television. It was Nicholas Nickleby, a picaresque melodrama with atmospheric chiaroscuro cinematography, a ripe cast of British heavyweights, and an ingénue making a memorable debut in the role of Madeleine Bray, the young woman determined to save her ailing father by consenting to be married alive to the monstrous patriarch Ralph Nickleby. It was also the only Dickens adaptation produced by Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios. "They couldn't believe," reflects Jill Balcon, 57 years after her first exposure to the klieg lights, "that I'd ever been so young."
In her long career as an actress, Balcon has been most consistently celebrated for her finely modulated voice. I can attest that even when on the phone to the council to complain about its inability to collect her rubbish, her voice sounds like a solo on the cor anglais. On the stage, she survived the experience of playing Zenocrate to Donald Wolfit's Tamburlaine in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, despite his habit of bashing her head about during the death scene. On the screen, she relished a vicious dormitory scrap with Jean Kent in Good Time Girl (1949), and the honorific roles that Derek Jarman bestowed upon her in Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993). She also modelled for Jacob Epstein, who importuned her in the Caprice restaurant and asked if he might immortalise her head. (The finished work is now lost, but if you have a piece of Jill Balcon in your conservatory, she wants to hear from you: "If I'm still on this earth, let me know.")

She lives in the kind of Hampshire cottage customarily featured on thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. A self-portrait by Daniel, stark and moody and angular, hangs in the hallway, a Christmas present during one of the family's impecunious periods. (The frame, of course, is also her son's work.) There's a fish pool in the garden, by which her friend and neighbour Alec Guinness would sit, in order to be on the safe margins of social gatherings. (At dinner parties, she remembers, he would always insist on sitting nearest the door.) Her kettle is on the blink, so as we sit down in the music-room to discuss her career, she consoles herself with a cup of last night's cold coffee.
"I didn't want to be in it at first," she says, recalling her debut in Nicholas Nickleby, "because I was just getting started and the last thing I wanted to be was the boss's daughter. I thought it would be awkward being around Ealing in a professional capacity. It's difficult to be taken seriously if you come out of that sort of stable." Jill Balcon bears a strong resemblance to her father - she could be nobody else's daughter - but her relationship with him was frequently explosive: "I was very frightened of him at times. I wasn't beaten or anything, but I was frightened of his wrath. He was a formidable figure in the home."

Their points of difference were legion. Her father was dismayed by her choice of a career, and though he paid her drama-school fees, she has no recollection of him ever praising any of her performances: "I remember when I went to work at the Bristol Old Vic. He said: 'Couldn't you find a job in London?'" He disapproved more deeply of her choice of a husband: Cecil Day-Lewis, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a married man, and the lover of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. When Balcon read a front-page story in London's Evening Standard, naming his daughter as co-respondent in Day-Lewis's divorce case, the portcullis crashed down. He refused to attend the wedding ceremony, or the reception at the Ivy. Charles Tennyson, the grandson of the Victorian poet laureate, gave the bride away, and Jill Balcon's cleaning lady, Mrs Pizzey, was a witness.
I ask her about her war experiences. She recalls how she exchanged a few hot words in a train compartment with the captured German airman, Franz von Werra, whose cross-country flight became the subject of Roy Ward Baker's film, The One that Got Away (1957). (Her father went to great lengths to ensure that this detail of the fugitive's story did not appear in the press reports of Von Werra's apprehension.)
She recalls her nights in the basement of her parents' apartment block, trying to sleep under a blue electric light, with the bombs exploding overhead. "I can remember going out to the Hungaria restaurant and spending the night under a table in one of the worst air raids of the war. We came out alive. But where Swan and Edgar's was, where Tower Records is now in Piccadilly Circus, there were sheets of glass covering the pavement, and water mains bursting everywhere."

She breaks off, slightly surprised that I'm interested in this part of her life. "I don't think my children have ever asked me about it," she notes. "Maybe they've seen so many movies, or they think it's boring..."
It hasn't stopped other people pumping her for her reminiscences. "It's very chastening," she observes, "to be a footnote in so many people's lives." More than a footnote, perhaps, but rarely the heroine. In Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoirs, she appears as the best friend with whose husband the author pursues a guilt-wracked affair. In a recent biography of Rosamond Lehmann, she figures as the depressingly young and vivacious new mistress who displaces the subject in the affections of her lover. In Sean Day-Lewis's Cecil Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life, she is the Other Woman who takes Cecil away from Sean's mother, Mary Day-Lewis. ("Jill Balcon comes into the picture," wrote Mary Day-Lewis in her diary. "Everything has the feeling of a nightmare.")
This is the book that has given her the most discomfort. "I encouraged him to write it because I felt it would be a good way of dealing with his grief," she contends. "I'm a great one for the truth, and there are 18 inaccuracies in the chapter on Cecil's death alone, and nobody was prepared to alter them." It concerns her that readers will assume - as many of her friends did at the time of publication - that her presence in the acknowledgments suggests that the book represents her own views of her late husband. "I had made a plea for one or two things to be cut for decency's sake," she says, "but they weren't."

I point out that her stepson's preface concedes that a Freudian analyst reading the book would probably conclude that it was the product of the son's desire to slay his father. "I haven't had Freudian analysis," she ventures, "but I did tell him to be careful that, in not wishing to smother [Cecil] with praise, he didn't condemn him. And that's exactly what happened. Cecil emerged as simply awful." It is the undignified details that stick in the mind: Cecil hiding in the lavatory to peruse adulterous correspondence; Jill Balcon's discovery of a note from a later lover, which fluttered from his pocket on a family holiday; the alliance that Rosamond Lehmann and Mary Day-Lewis formed against the man who done them wrong. "We both felt," Lehmann told Sean Day-Lewis, "we were nothing but obstacles in the way of his desires and determination. No kindness, no courtesy, sympathy or (apparently) conscience."
The poet laureate's widow views this with a psychoanalytical eye: "I think that, in a way, a son who has not made it as his father did, has to assassinate him. I don't think that Cecil was without fault. That would be ridiculous. But it's how you do it." Daniel Day-Lewis's dynastic marriage to Rebecca Miller, the daughter of Arthur Miller and the late Inge Morath, has guaranteed Jill Balcon a place in the index of many more biographies to come. Perhaps she should be grateful that her daughter Tamasin did no more than step out with Martin Amis.

We move into the kitchen. My hostess has decided that before she runs me back to the station, she will make me lunch. Alec Guinness, she says, maintained that an omelette should be cooked for 55 seconds, exactly the same time it takes to recite a Shakespearean sonnet. I sit down at the dining-table which, I learn, was crafted by Daniel at woodwork lessons at Bedales. Compared to the two-tier triangular egg-rack that I brought proudly home to my parents, this is a Grinling Gibbons. When Daniel Day-Lewis decided to become an actor, it was a terrible loss to the world of marquetry. Everything you've read about his cobbling skills is also true, according to his mother's description of the exquisite pair of shoes that he made for his mother-in-law, Inge Morath, during her final illness.
I had thought that Jill Balcon might be reticent about discussing her children. They are, however, her favourite subject. She tells me how, during their childhood in Greenwich, Daniel sang at a local church for two bob a time; how Tamasin went roller-skating at the Woolwich Road baths and came home highly decorated. "She used to go off with her little case of sandwiches every Saturday morning. She was the champ..." Mementos of her family are visible all over the cottage. In the kitchen, I notice a saved piled of Tamasin's cookery columns; Daniel's face staring from a magazine rack; a poster for Stars and Bars tacked to the back of a kitchen unit. She admits that she sees her children and grandchildren - particularly Cashel and Ronan, Daniel's sons with Rebecca Miller - less often than she'd like. Though Daniel phones every weekend, he manages meetings only a couple of times a year. In the time between, she keeps tabs on him via newspaper profiles. "Some of these journalists are very clever. They have insights into him that I would never think of."

October, however, offers a double pleasure. Her next acting role will be in a Radio 4 play entitled Deadheading Roses, to be broadcast around Christmas, in which Daniel has been persuaded to participate. Will he play her son? "No," she smiles, "my lover." It is her greatest regret, she says, that neither her husband nor her father lived to see Daniel's success; that they knew him only as a rather troubled teenage boy. Her wish conjures up a mental image of Cecil Day-Lewis and Michael Balcon, walking down the red carpet to the premiere of Gangs of New York, their differences forgotten in admiration of their heir.
"They would have been so proud of him," she reflects. "If only they could have known." Or, if only, perhaps, they had rushed downstairs to tell her that her son was on the television, looking impossibly young.