During Daniel Day-Lewis’s self- imposed three-year “retirement” from acting, a set of photos appeared in a newspaper. Unlike most blurry paparazzi shots, they did not depict the strikingly handsome actor wafting out of a select club or sunning himself on the beaches of St Tropez. No, they caught the man dubbed the Olivier of his generation mending shoes in a Florentine back street. For the first time in his career, the word “cobblers” was being applied to Day-Lewis.

Given his reputation for intensive preparation for his infrequent roles (there are only 20 movies to his name), the supposition was that he was researching a new film. Actually, he was simply cobbling, appreciating the methodical stillness that it offered.

Though his successes have been both critical (an Oscar for My Left Foot in 1990) and commercial (The Last of the Mohicans in 1992), Day-Lewis has a love-hate relationship with cinema. “Part of this,” he says, “is that as an actor you learn, you learn; you shoot and shoot for a long time; and then you’re dog meat. And then you realise that you learnt nothing. And that’s a difficult thing to live with.”

His last film, The Boxer (1997), had been a bruising experience, and he was prepared to wait ten years if necessary for the right part. Enter Martin Scorsese, with whom Day-Lewis has a special understanding developed back in 1993 on The Age of Innocence, pushing his treasured project Gangs of New York. It took the weight of the director’s influence and the quality of the villainous role of Bill the Butcher to tempt Day-Lewis back into films. We are lucky he gave way. His Bill is a multilayered metaphor for New York itself, and worthy of this astonishing performer.

Day-Lewis’s career sparked into life with an intricate performance as the homosexual wanderer in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). His reputation grew rapidly, but his choices were coded by a rigorous testing process — you don’t audition Day-Lewis, he auditions you.

For every role there comes a litany of his momentous off-screen prep. My Left Foot started it, when he restricted himself to a wheelchair even off-set. For In the Name of the Father (1993), he was confined in solitary and for his angst-ridden turn in The Crucible (1996) he learnt to build 17th-century houses and drive oxen. Before shooting began on Gangs of New York, he took lessons from the staff of a traditional Peckham butchers. All of which can make him a trifle intense on set, but the results on screen are hard to argue with.

It’s tough to encapsulate in words the gift that Day-Lewis presents to cinema: he finds currents of inner life within the roles, an air of suggestion that in the meagre time we are sharing together we have not even begun to discover the maze of complexity beneath the surface of his characters. “I approach my roles not as an actor, but as a person,” he explained elusively. “Otherwise, it would be about as interesting as watching paint dry.”

It is, though, a process that draws him close to the abyss. The strain leaves him physically drained; “scooped out” is how he puts it. So intensive was his absorption of literature’s finest frayed psyche, Hamlet, that he collapsed halfway through a 1990 theatrical run, claiming that he had glimpsed the ghost of his own father alongside him on stage. He has never trodden the boards again.

The nearest he finds to peace is in his adopted home of Ireland. Although born and brought up in England, Day-Lewis took up the nationality of his father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, inspired by the lyrical, troubled, passionate nature of the place. He has a home in Co Wicklow and dislikes journalists referring to him as British.

And yet he also claims of his acting work that “if I weren’t allowed this outlet, there wouldn’t be a place for me in society”. Here lies the reason he avoids making movies — another role means an emotional journey fraught with peril. And despite a likely Oscar nomination, he has no plans to don another soul in the near future. “Nothing happened over the course of making Gangs of New York that made me think: ‘Why don’t I do this more often?’” It’s such a shame. Once more, our loss will be footwear’s gain.

CV: Daniel Day-Lewis

Born in London, on April 29, 1957

Parents His mother is Jill Balcon (daughter of the Ealing Studio boss Michael Balcon), his father was the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis

Married to Rebecca Miller, the daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller, since 1996. They have two young sons: Ronan (four), and Cashel Blake (born last May). He has another son, Gabriel-Kane Adjani (seven), with his previous partner Isabelle Adjani

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