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"+++dropcap\n\nWhen Daniel Day-Lewis was born, on April 29, 1957, his father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, greeted him with a poem. “The Newborn” is pastoral, with, as in much of C. Day-Lewis’s work, an underlying dread. The second stanza ends:\n\n+++\n\n> this speck of clay\\\n> And spirit shall begin\\\n> To feed on hope,\\\n> To learn how truth blows cold and\\\n> loves betray.\n\nThe father was fifty-three years old, and Daniel was the second child of his second marriage, to the actress Jill Balcon. The elder Lewis had been a Communist, part of that circle of British poets satirized as MacSpaunday, for its members: Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and C. Day-Lewis. When Daniel was ten, his father became the Poet Laureate of England. When he was fifteen, his father died. “This speck of clay” has since become one of the most startling actors of his generation, astonishing critics in 1986 when he appeared in two films that opened on the same day, playing a gay punk in “My Beautiful Laundrette” and a constricted upper-class turn-of-the-century twit in “A Room with a View.” On that same day, the actor was in London, playing Vladimir Mayakovski in Dusty Hughes’ “Futurists” at the National Theatre. He told one of the many interviewers who descended upon him, “If I weren’t allowed this outlet, there wouldn’t be a place for me in society.”\n\nA tall, skinny, athletic man, who runs a couple of miles every morning, he seems to thrive on his own oddness: he owns a house in London but is of no fixed address, undertakes each of his roles as an alchemical transformation, and has perfected the trick of vanishing. He disappeared for nearly a year before the script of “My Left Foot” found its way to him, and for almost two years after his controversial Hamlet at the National Theatre. He emerged from that eclipse to play Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” which opened last month, and has recently completed Martin Scorsese’s version of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” in which he plays Newland Archer, who gives up Ellen Olenska, the thing he wants most in life, for the sake of duty.\n\n“Mohicans” actually marked an unusual departure for Day-Lewis. “I’m generally interested by people who don’t understand the rules, who don’t understand what’s happening to them, to their lives, who are confused by the signposts around them,” he says. “For once in my life I was fascinated by someone who knew how to read the signs: Hawkeye doesn’t suffer from uncertainty. I found the absence of contemporary neurosis fascinating, and highly desirable.”\n\nThe world that Day-Lewis inhabits is, by contrast, a little like one of the mysterious places in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, an island that gives off darkness. He seems to exist in bright flashes against a gloom that could be existential despair, Celtic twilight, or deep depression. He turns up the darkness by spending large amounts of time alone, often wandering throughout Europe with a small, ancient watercolor set. With it all, he exhibits the charm of an overbright schoolboy on whom influences of an emotional, literary, or poetic nature will make lasting marks. He is concerned, says his sister, Tamasin, with “absolutes, large moral dilemmas”; back in London, he materializes on a racing bike, clad in slick black racing gear, to sit with his friends and discuss, they say, “the important things.” He shows regard for and empathy with younger people, such as Matthew Tynan, who was nine when his father, Kenneth Tynan, died; the common ground, unexpressed, is that of children of artists, geniuses, writers, who grow up with a set of strict abstract standards, a lack of material directives about success, and a dead father who lives on as a body of work.\n\nIn America, Daniel Day-Lewis is glimpsed in hotel lobbies, fleeting and uncomfortable, with a diffident smile and hair to his shoulders. He checks in under pseudonyms, keeps to his room, occasionally disappears into huge studio cars. When he is in this country, it is either to become someone else or to receive awards for having done so. The impression he gives is of transition, flux. “I always prefer to leave before I feel unwelcome,” he said recently. “I feel the urge to escape, but I’m taking a lot of herbs for it,” he added, cracking a small glass vial containing a brown liquid. “If I haven’t done a runner in six months, we’ll know they’ve worked.” His personal life, which he keeps as secret as he can, has thus far failed to jell into marriage or children. He has been involved in long relationships with women whose names he prefers to keep to himself. For the last three years, he has been involved quietly, intermittently, but apparently intensely with the French actress Isabelle Adjani; rumors of a marriage and rumors of a breakup routinely surface, usually at the same time.\n\nIn London, what separates Day-Lewis from his contemporaries—even from the skeptical, ironic milieu of Notting Hill Gate life, which was the locus, in the last decade, of a renaissance of films, made mostly for England’s Channel Four—is his Irishness. Ireland, says the National Theatre’s artistic director, Richard Eyre, is important to Daniel, because “the Irish identity is a release for him, away from the surface English middle-class identity; being Irish releases his inhibitions.” Under a magnolia tree at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, with desert boots on his feet and a small Navajo silver necklace, along with a Tibetan silk cord, around his neck, he talks about Ireland. His father was born in County Laois, but he never took his children there; the family spent holidays farther west, at the Errisaesk Guest House, in Connemara, for two years, and later at Old Head, County Mayo. There were horse races on the beach at low tide, “with two poles stuck in the sand and the tinkers setting up illegal betting booths,” Day-Lewis recalls. “One year, Tamasin rode in the race, and one year I fell in love with a girl from the town on a beautiful chestnut horse, with her black hair flying.” He talks in an Irish accent, which dips slightly into the flat tones of Southeast London. “The connection is to do with the nature of the place, not only the cultural heritage. My father wrote a book of poems called ‘The Whispering Roots’ about his connection, and I understand, from my point of view through him, all the feelings he has about that place, so it feels like home”:\n\n> And still the land compels me; not\\\n> ancestral\\\n> Ghosts, nor regret for childhood’s\\\n> fabled charms,\\\n> But a rare peacefulness, consoling,\\\n> festal,\\\n> As if the old religion we oppressed\\\n> all\\\n> Those years folded the stray within\\\n> a father’s arms.\n\nDay-Lewis wears a Claddagh ring, the Irish friendship ring, on which two hands meet at a crowned heart. His is gold. His next project, a film set to begin in January, is Irish. But he remains a traveller in the homeland. It is Tamasin—she is an independent documentary filmmaker married to John Shearer, the BBC’s head of broadcasting for the south of England—who bought a house in Mayo, the purchase of which whipped the local population into great excitement, because the name Day-Lewis, since his Academy Award for “My Left Foot,” has achieved heroic resonance in Ireland. “I’ve got the house, he’s got the passport,” Tamasin says.\n\n+++dropcap\n\nC. Day-Lewis, true to his socialist principles, had sent his young son to a state primary school in South London, near their home, a Georgian house in Greenwich. There Daniel acquired his yob accent, a group of disreputable friends, and the habit of knocking around in the streets and coarse fishing in the Thames. He was sent to his first boarding school after his parents realized what a poor education he was getting, and eventually he joined his sister at Bedales, a progressive school in Petersfield, Hampshire, founded in 1893 as an alternative to the conventional public-school system.\n\n+++\n\nBy then, he and Tamasin had put on plays in London at the home of their grandfather Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios. “I did a one-boy show of Pinter’s ‘The Dumb Waiter’ when I was about ten. I don’t think I ever learned the play, exactly—just bits, and I made up the rest. But for me it *was* ‘The Dumb Waiter.’ ” While at Bedales, Daniel briefly joined the National Youth Theatre, which left him with “bad thoughts about the theatre,” he says. “Having been completely convinced that theatre was the only plausible life for me, I decided there was something intrinsically very seedy and distasteful about it.” He describes himself at the time as “very spotty, very spotty, quite morose, quite sullen. I met up with a friend of mine years later, and he said, ‘What I remember about you is your saying, “Want to come down the Edgware Road to get a flick knife?” ’ I think my father was preoccupied with whether I’d survive as a human being, because the last couple of years before he died I got into a lot of trouble: usual stuff, shoplifting—*that* was the end of the world—and smoking and drinking and messing around with girls.”\n\nHis mother’s best friend was Elizabeth Jane Howard, the novelist, who was married to Kingsley Amis, and when C. Day-Lewis was dying of cancer of the pancreas, the Day-Lewises went to live in the Amis house, where a nurse was already in residence for Elizabeth Jane Howard’s mother. Daniel was awed by “the ferociously high-powered banter between Kingsley and Martin,” he says. “They had a severe wit that made you feel like a cockroach in the corner, made me not want to do anything that would announce my presence in the room.” Martin Amis remembers Daniel as “tall and skinny and spotty, with a very strong positive charge, the way some people can also have a negative charge. I have a clear visual memory of him loping, sidling around with his head in the air, not cowed by the situation.”\n\nC. Day-Lewis died on May 22, 1972. Daniel was brought in from Bedales at the very end. “I was brutal about my father’s death,” he says. “I thought, He’s not alive anymore, life goes on—and I didn’t think about it for a couple of years.” Last spring, in a piece he wrote for the London *Observer*, he described the moment thus: “I sat grandly at his death bed amidst a circle of bright-eyed, attentive women that Lorca might have arranged, poised in their preparation for an imminent death, ravenous for grief, on the cusp of mourning. I was holding his right hand, which had been presented to me with absurd gravity and which remained the only recognizable part of a wasted, prematurely cadaverous body. Since that bizarre, alienated, emotionless first encounter with the great scythe, which left me reeling from my own indifference, my sense of loss has grown, soured, devoured, belched and finally purified into what it is now—the eternal certainty of grief, ignorance and the mystery of love.”\n\nBack at Bedales, it was woodworking that he chose to throw himself into. He was, in the school parlance, “Select,” one of the élite—a position he valued. He did not return to the National Youth Theatre after his first summer there. “I decided I wanted to load lorries instead,” he says. “That corresponded with a misconception about another way of life—that of the craftsman who lives peacefully, in touch with his work, with that tactile relationship, every day. It wasn’t entirely unfounded, because all the craftsmen I’d met had been wonderful people, and it seemed an obvious connection between them and the work and the things they touched, the tools and the wood. The workshop was a sanctuary, and when it came time to leave school I was in a dilemma. I applied for an apprenticeship with John Makepeace, the cabinetmaker. I didn’t want to be a designer, I wanted to be a craftsman. I wanted to be subservient; wanted to see through the ideas of somebody else. I was terrified of the responsibility of creativity. I probably felt my mind wasn’t a place where I was comfortable.”\n\nAt sixteen, he took a huge dose of migraine pills. “I didn’t know that I was messing with hallucinogenics, or that they had a cumulative effect. I took enough to keep me hallucinating for a fortnight. They’re probably still in my system. I haven’t had a migraine since.” In a severe state of disorientation, he ended up in a mental hospital, and was treated there as a heroin addict. “I had to give my greatest performance of sanity” in order to get out, he says. He then applied to just one theatre school, the Bristol Old Vic, so that if he didn’t get in “it would be a sign from the gods it was not meant to be.” He was accepted at Bristol just as John Makepeace found a place for him, and he chose Bristol. His doubts were temporarily resolved: “Acting was the only acceptable alternative to being a real person.”\n\nIn three years at Bristol, he learned to get on with people, and after the embarrassment of ballet class and the shock of “being encouraged to make a complete jerk of myself” he did interesting work: Nigel Williams’ “Class Enemy,” in which six lower-class schoolboys excoriate everything within reach, and “Funny Peculiar,” by Mike Stott. “I played a strange boy named Stanley who’s always getting in the way and saying things like ‘Where I go for training there’s a lad sold his head.’ He had greasy, lank hair, vacuum-formed Corfam shoes with elastic sides, and slightly short polyester-mix gray trousers.” He also played the more compelling parts of Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” and the lead in Chris Bond’s “Dracula.” “But ‘Look Back in Anger’ looked so tame after ‘Class Enemy,’ which was the ultimate expression of working-class rage.”\n\nHe recalls, “I had a misconception about theatre, as about cabinetmaking. One by one, the veils were lifted, and I began to see what the possibilities were. When I saw Phil Daniels in Barrie Keefe’s ‘Gotcha\\!’ it was like five veils. The play is so hard, so poetic, in its inarticulacy; beautifully written and acted, in its righteous rage. One of the reasons so many actors of my generation have been drawn to actors in America—Brando first, Clift, De Niro, Pesci, Duvall—is the way in which a poetry is created out of the life of someone who can’t express himself.”\n\nFor seven months after Bristol, he found no work. He lived in West London with other out-of-work actors and musicians, “wrecked.” They were all on the dole; Day-Lewis spent his fourteen pounds a week on intoxicating substances. “I looked in the mirror one day after four, five months of that, and I looked like a demon. I got out my running shoes and started pounding the track.” In 1982, he took over from Rupert Everett as Guy Bennet in Julian Mitchell’s “Another Country.” Only one critic returned to review his performance, but gave it a rave. He played Captain Bligh’s second-in-command in the 1984 film “The Bounty,” then went on tour in England with “Romeo and Juliet.” He found Romeo “a complete wanker” and hated the desolation of “Margate in December, amusement arcades closed down with things flapping in the wind and old people waiting for the moment of truth.” He was encountering things he’d heard about as a child: “the ghastly smell of cabbage in doss-house corridors, and fag ash in the basin.” He particularly hated the costumes: “It was like having a halogen lamp glowing inside one’s crotch. There was a lot of tights and leather, waders that stopped at a certain place. You’d walk onstage and wait for ten minutes for the school-matinée audiences of fifteen-year-olds to stop howling with laughter.” The tour was with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was assumed that the classics were a good line of work for me, because I enjoyed speaking verse and had the right nose for it.”\n\n+++dropcap\n\nIn late 1984, he played Dracula again, in the East End, this time as an albino: “I thought all his color had long since drained away.” He went to see Stephen Frears for “My Beautiful Laundrette” with his albino-Dracula hair, the bleached white touched with silver. For the part of Johnny, he kept it “looking like a wolf, really like a shaving brush”; he gave the right-wing gay punk all the mystery of Lawrence of Arabia and all the menace of Bob Hoskins. By the time he met with James Ivory to discuss the role of the fastidious, forlorn Cecil in “A Room with a View,” he was sporting his punk pompadour from “Laundrette.”\n\n+++\n\n+++inset-left\n\n[#cartoon: /cartoons/593b5cd83adc75471b34aff3]\n\n+++\n\n“James Ivory asked me which character I saw myself as, Cecil or George,” the rambunctious, virile, slightly coarse rival eventually played by Julian Sands. “I said no one in his right mind would ever admit to seeing himself as Cecil, and I’d rather play him than be him, understand what it is to be that man and thereby avoid the possibility of ever being him. I knew what he was going through—he couldn’t open his mouth without alienating people, that’s all. There was a person alive underneath all that who was desperate and anxious and insecure enough to be incredibly arrogant, and in the end he could never make contact, so he was terribly lonely.”\n\nIn March, 1986, when the two films opened simultaneously in New York, he says, “I was thought to be a reincarnation of Beelzebub, because of the transformation.” By now his head was shaved; he was playing Mayakovski, under Richard Eyre’s direction, at the National Theatre. Says Day-Lewis, “Mayakovski was the image of the child-man, a really potent man, always hungry for sweets and cigarettes and kisses, so incredibly underdeveloped, so in need of oral gratification. His life was bound to the Revolution, and he sacrificed his lyric sensibility. He said in a poem that he was ‘setting my heel on the throat of my own song.’ ”\n\nHe was on a morning television show when Philip Kaufman saw him and decided he wanted him to play Tomas in his film adaptation of Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” “The first thing I understood about Tomas was his love for Tereza,” says Day-Lewis. “The other thing was his discovery that he doesn’t care about relinquishing his life as a surgeon. I understood my own secret and deeply rooted desire to wake up one morning and discover that I didn’t need to do what I was doing.” Hanif Kureishi, who wrote “My Beautiful Laundrette,” says, “He was always talking about wanting to give up acting and wanting to make his fucking furniture. Dan is fantastically intelligent but not an intellectual. He’s fragile, strong, intense, and his moods change rapidly. We used to have great depressions.” Day-Lewis says, “Hanif would ring up and say, ‘Dark, dark,’ quoting from Milton—‘O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon.’ That was how we saw things.”\n\nHe went straight into Pat O’Connor’s film “Stars and Bars,” and describes himself as being, after a year of films and six months of theatre, “not race tuned—like dog meat, really.” After that film was finished, he took off and travelled for several months. “I didn’t really have a home. I’d lost my belief in what home represented. Through a passage of time, I’d seen the astonishingly rapid disintegration of two households where I grew up—my parents’ house and my grandparents’ house both went. The houses, which had been apparently indestructible, became nothing. I came to think of the concept of home as an elaborately constructed false front.” He set off with the little metal paintbox, his sepia ink, his running shoes; no credit cards, just grubby banknotes and Eurocheques. “I was avoiding everything.” He hung out with students of the avant-garde director Patrice Chéreau at Avignon, slept outside the walls of the Palais des Papes. “Sometimes you need to go crazy, and it’s easier to be crazy with strangers than with friends. At that time, in London, I had a sense of being pressed in on. I needed somewhere I could wander freely and be an idiot if I wanted to.” He prefers to characterize real life as something beyond his grasp: “When it came time to go back, I found I was the owner of a small house in Brook Green.” Tamasin had made sure he bought the house. “He needed to,” she says briskly.\n\n“There isn’t a bourgeois corner to him,” says Kureishi, who describes the house as “ugly and sterile, with a picture of Keith Richards, torn out from the paper, stuck on the kitchen wall.” He had no furniture, though accounts differ. “The bed never arrived,” says Kureishi. “It *did* arrive,” says Tamasin. “It simply took a long time—he wanted a beautiful bed.” Kureishi recalls, “There was nothing in his kitchen; you had to go out to buy salt.” Richard Eyre mentions three lettuce leaves and one grain of brown rice. Someone said it was the unhappiest house he’d ever been in. “I used to lie on the floor and brood,” Day-Lewis says. “One evening, I heard a strange flopping around, something heavy falling into the letter box. I went and picked it up; it was a phosphorescent white script with ‘My Left Foot’ written on it. No letter, no explanation. I’d made myself the promise never to work unless I needed to. There’s something ludicrous about acting all the time.” He says the first page of the script was the most powerful he’d ever read. “It was a foot, this foot moving across, taking a record out of a rack, putting it back again, taking another one, moving across to a turntable, putting the needle on a very specific part, stopping the turntable, letting it go. I knew that this was a wonderful piece of writing about a fascinating man and that it couldn’t be done.\n\n“I felt I understood Christy, knew what he was about, the bloody-mindedness, the sense of being trapped.” He spent eight weeks among cerebral-palsy patients, and during the six weeks of filming, in July and August of 1988, his body became accustomed to the strange position he made it take. The film contained both sides of Ireland, the soul and the carousing. Day-Lewis says, “Every taxi-driver had a story about Christy, had been banned from a pub with him. It was everyone’s story, their business as well as ours. We had to fight to make it our secret, because films should be secretive experiences.”\n\nAfter that, he went straight to Patagonia to make a film about an itinerant dentist, called “Eversmile New Jersey”—one senses a desperation for levity in that choice—and returned to London to play Hamlet under Richard Eyre’s direction at the National. “I started rehearsing in a state of severe exhaustion—mental, physical, moral, and theatrical. But I have a thing about facing up to things. When I read my father’s biography, ‘The Buried Day,’ I found that he dealt with his fears by plunging headlong into them. I find it difficult to live with myself when I know I’ve avoided something that has caused me fear. ‘Hamlet’ is a crazy thing to do, but I didn’t want to avoid doing it.” The reviews were mixed; many critics chose to regard him as a movie star arrogantly taking on the classics. But the play was in repertoire, and he stayed in it for more than eight months. Richard Eyre thinks his mistake in casting Day-Lewis as Hamlet was “the seamless join between him and Hamlet. He really *is* Hamlet. He’s much more comfortable as a character actor, playing someone from whom he has a distance. He was lacerated by the critics in a squalid display of envy. I wasn’t surefooted myself; I had just taken over the National Theatre and was not in the best state to be Daniel’s surrogate father.”\n\nDay-Lewis can be diverting on the subject of the Olivier Theatre’s stage at the National: “Designed by Olivier before he died to kill every generation of actor after him, with an acoustical deaf spot in the first four rows of the balcony and a G spot on the stage which belongs to Michael Gambon and Michael Bryant and is the only place from which you can be heard.” And he can be New Age about it: “The Olivier is a sponge; it takes as much energy as you’ll give and more, and what that does is undermine your immune system.” But what eventually happened couldn’t be blamed on the Olivier. The cast had performed in a castle in Dubrovnik and then returned to London. The first night back, all went well; the next day, Day-Lewis awoke with foreboding. “The ideas I’d explored when I was working on the play began to torment me once my resistance had disintegrated. Images of childhood, of my father. Before going onstage every night, in the transition between the darkness of the wings and the light of the stage, I had to run a gantlet of strange, fleeting images of myself as a child. My father had become a remote, hovering figure, not unaffectionate but slightly threatening. That tunnel I had to go through was necessary to me initially; then it became a trial, so that by the time I arrived onstage I was very often already destabilized. There was a photograph of my father in my dressing room, a big, beautiful one, staring very directly, alive, a really living photograph. That night, I went into the theatre with halting steps and met Ian Charleson, who was going to take over from me later anyway. He told me he always felt if you could get through the first scene, with the father’s ghost, you’d be all right for the rest of the play. That was the scene where I stopped that night. I had the strange sensation I was talking to my father.” He walked off the stage and never returned. The only explanation Day-Lewis has ever given for his breakdown is “What he said to me on that night seemed particularly hard to bear.”\n\nHe spent the night at a friend’s house. Then he went to live with his sister and her family at their country house, near Bristol. “He was here for some time; there was nowhere else he could have gone,” Tamasin says. “We’re closer to each other than to anybody else. I sussed that in a sense it would bring him back to a life and a reality that would give him a focus and a structure.” He amused her three small children with games, a different bedtime story for each, and feats of fire-eating; they called him “wicked Uncle Daniel.”\n\nHe emerged from seclusion to receive the Oscar as Best Actor for “My Left-Foot”; he also won ten other Best Actor awards for the part—four British, two Irish, one Canadian, and three American. It’s simpler to say that the only award he didn’t collect was the Golden Globe; he got only a nomination. The Oscar arrived in the spring of 1990; it wasn’t until the spring of 1991 that he worked again, emerging as Hawkeye, the white man brought up by Indians, in “The Last of the Mohicans.” “I was still a bit shaky,” he says. “But I’d discovered the way I wanted to work. I found it during ‘My Left Foot’—on a small scale, with a group of people sharing the same secret, shutting out the surrounding din, soundproofing myself. Then I got the script for ‘The Last of the Mohicans,’ which couldn’t be further removed from that. In rereading the script, I kept thinking, I cannot afford to be interested in this. But part of the attraction was that the first human sign you find in the script is . . . a foot.”\n\nIt’s no longer the first human sign in the film, which contains a great many feet; those of the seventy-odd stuntmen and the twelve hundred extras who roil about in the French and Indian War, to say nothing of the feet of the featured players—Redcoats, French soldiers, Hurons, and Mohawks. What you do not see, is much of Daniel Day-Lewis in closeup; he is often buried in a crowd, indistinct behind big leaves, underlit, jammed to the edge of the screen, misted out. The role of Hawkeye, which one imagines to be full of graceful heroics, is, in this “Last of the Mohicans,” oddly peripheral. Day-Lewis is given only minor feats to accomplish: the dispatching of various extras, the firing of two long rifles as he runs, and an exit through a waterfall, from the inside, at dusk. There’s a touch of hunt-the-needle to the way he is displayed in the film, and the impression he leaves is ungraspable.\n\n+++dropcap\n\nThe transition from being the last of “The Last of the Mohicans,” almost a free man, to being Newland Archer, the tradition-bound New Yorker of the eighteen-seventies, was a study in Day-Lewis’s osmotic rituals. In Los Angeles, he was long-haired, rangy, with as much of a sense of the outdoors about him as the garden of the Hotel Bel-Air allowed: the magnolia tree loomed large, the insects buzzed, the birds chirped, there was hair on his arms, his feet looked big and scuffly in their brown boots. In New York, he checked into a small hotel that approximated, within the limits of architecture and the difficulty of finding good help these days, a grand house of the nineteenth century. For a while there, he was himself. His shoulder-length hair was now just below his ears, and on his cheeks grew impressive Bismarck whiskers. Then, abruptly, he was gone. A little later, it turned out that he had never left but was now registered as Newland Archer.\n\n+++\n\nHis suite had two smallish rooms, the more public one set with dark polished furniture; a small bronze of a horse pranced on the coffee table. Soon his hair was short and shaped, and the whiskers had retreated to the size of civilized sideburns. His limbs, which only recently had seemed made for striding across great wildernesses, now moved with the constraint of one used to dodging velvet portières hung with fringe and tassels. Martin Scorsese was leading him and the cast—Michelle Pfeiffer as the Countess Olenska, Winona Ryder as May Welland, Richard E. Grant as the slimy Lawrence Lefferts—in rehearsals, but Day-Lewis had gone ahead, already almost Archer. The Tibetan silk cord and the Navajo silver necklace were no longer visible; instead of denim he wore a white shirt buttoned to the top, and a tie, and a vest, and a jacket. In the umbrella stand in the suite’s tiny foyer rested a walking stick, and on it a homburg, with the thick rolled rim that you see on no other hat. In a mahogany chest of drawers were arranged his tapes and CDs: Irish folk music, Irish jazz, Irish singers in one drawer, and, in another, requiems. He was playing Fauré’s “Requiem,” and the infinite repetitive sadness of the piece hung low in the room, like a particular kind of weather.\n\nThe suite seemed to be the chambers of a faintly aesthetic and very stiff gentleman of Old New York, who leafed through a thick book of poems, found one called “Stephanotis,” and produced from the next room some fourteen little bottles of cologne, which he arranged on the low table. Some had been sent from Paris by Isabelle Adjani. One smelled of hay, another of herbs, another of after-shave; there was Blenheim Bouquet and Floris’s Stephanotis. He was concerned, in a playful yet entirely serious way, with finding Archer’s scent. The surfeit of odors made one giddy.\n\nThe book was the first complete edition of C. Day-Lewis’s poems, published in England on the twentieth anniversary of his death. It was just the galleys, but Daniel hadn’t seen it before. He kept opening it to look for specific things—poems or something else. First, he found “Walking Away,” written for one of C. Day-Lewis’s two sons by his first marriage—the eldest, Séan. He read the end aloud:\n\n> How selfhood begins with a\\\n> walking away,\\\n> And love is proved in the letting\\\n> go.\n\nThen he found the one written for him and Tamasin. He held the book open and talked about his father, glanced at the page again, and then read it aloud:\n\n> Forgive my coldnesses, now past\\\n> recall,\\\n> Angers, injustice, moods contrary,\\\n> mean or blind;\\\n> And best, my dears, forgive\\\n> Yourselves, when I am gone, for all\\\n> Love-signals you ignored and for\\\n> the fugitive\\\n> Openings you never took into my\\\n> mind.\n\n“How could we?” he asked. “How did we know they were there?” And he put the book down and paced, and mentioned Britten’s “War Requiem,” which led to a long story, but a story that was never finished, because then he was talking about Wilfred Owen, an edition of whose collected poems his father had edited. He quoted the poem called “Futility.” And he talked about death, and said, “Did we have the chance to take those openings? I don’t think we did.”\n\nIn parting, he said, “Another day, another death,” and it was a sort of joke; but the willed lugubrious atmosphere of the room had taken over, a flirtation with misery that had become just misery. Not quite Newland Archer, not even an actor preparing. Something else.\n\n“He will never be cynical,” Richard Eyre said a short time afterward. “He’s remarkable, because there’s a lot of pain. You wish him less pain, but it seems cruel to wish anything for him that would make him less himself.”\n\n“Fauré’s ‘Requiem’?” Tamasin said, weeks later. “I love it. They played it at our father’s memorial.”♦\n\n"
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/10/12/actor-from-the-shadows>